Food waste is a huge problem all over the world. In the United States of America, for example, approximately 40% of all food is thrown to the trash. This has caused several drawbacks to American society, the most pronounced of which is price. Food waste causes over $218 billion dollars to be wasted in the economy annually, at every stage of the food manufacturing process, such as fertilization, croplands, water, energy, livestock, etc. These amounts of waste are unprecedented and occur at both the institutional and retail levels. Our solution to help this problem is straightforward in its logic: to help aid people be more mindful of their wasteful habits, and keep track of when food is about to expire. Currently, people simply do not have the time or the mental energy to manually organize their eating habits. The technology we will be using is OCR( Optical Character Recognition), and the powerful cameras that smartphones have. This technology will be utilized in our mobile application, and users will be able to simply scan the barcode of any food item, and be sent push notifications directly to their mobile device, informing them of expiration dates and reminding them to consume their food before that happens. Customer’s data would be stored on the back-end of our application, which includes both the servers and databases. Customers would include young people, people who want to cut back on costs, working class people, and environmentally conscious people, among others. Among all contributors of food waste, Restaurants and food sellers are the biggest. The adoption of our application would be beneficial not only to retail consumers, but also would reduce the costs are food establishments. Our team is committed to seeing the completion of this project, and would appreciate any feedback, questions, concerns, etc.
Sincerely,
Abhishek Parekh
Michael Tod
Natan Ashkenazi
Laura Ponton