The Google Solutions Challenge is an annual event hosted by Google to give prospective developers the opportunity to contribute to society by leveraging various software technologies to solve or work towards solving at least 1 of the UN's 17 sustainable development goals.
In 2022, we decided to take on this challenge by creating an app to facilitate the prevention of food insecurity. The app allows grocery stores, resturants, and farms of all kinds to list any excess food. We then connect them to charities based on multiple factors like location, shelf life, and quantity of food.
By doing this, our app aims to end hunger by providing food insecure families with a large supply of food via non-profit organizations in hopes of ending food insecurity and hunger.
Worldwide, about a third of the food we produce is wasted annually. Food waste is particularly prevelant in the developed world. In the US, about 80 billion pounds of food is wasted annually. This is more than any other country in the world.
This 80 billion pounds of waste fills the majority of our landfills. It also amounts to over 218 billion USD. That is about 1600 USD per American family. Meanwhile, around 42 million people experience some level of food insecurity in the US. Imagine if we could somehow get some of those 80 billion pounds of food waste to those people. If we did that, we could end food insecurity in the US. We think that our app will be able to help with the redistribution effort.
Our hope is to play a small but significant role in minimizing and possibly end food insecurity and hunger. We believe that this will have a knock on effect by better preventing food waste, helping families find better economic opportunity, and reducing poverty.
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- A progressive web app(PWA) are web apps that use service workers and manifest files to make web apps installable and reliable, allowing us to mimick native apps.
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- React is a frontend javascript library developed by Meta that allows developers to easily create web apps.
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- Firebase is a NoSQL database developed Google
Once downloaded and installed, use npm or yarn to build a version of the pwa. When you do that, you should see a build folder. You should run this build file on a server. Once you run the app in production mode, you can install the app as a pwa.
There are many ways to run the app on a server. One way is to use npm or yarn to install or add serve and run it on there.
If you do not do a production build of the app, you will not be able to install the app as a pwa.
- Michael Lin
- Adithya Konduru
- Leo Shen
- Mihir Trivedi