Delez

Inspiration

In the UK, an alarming 9.5 million tonnes of food are wasted annually, while 8.4 million people struggle with food poverty. Simultaneously, over 63% of adults face challenges related to overweight and obesity due to poor dietary choices.

Being university students ourselves, we noticed that the issue of throwing away food due to expiry is quite prominent. Living in a world where sustainability is only getting increasingly important, we noticed that while there are numerous food-related applications out there, they primarily only seem to focus on large-scale business food-saving efforts, which may be inaccessible for some people. So how can we–as students or just individual people–contribute to alleviating this challenge?

As a solution to this, we have designed, partly-built and propose Delez. A simple yet effective way of sharing food with others and prompting healthier eating habits through accessible and delicious recipes.

What it does

Delez is a mobile application designed to reduce food wastage and promote healthy eating by enabling its users to share surplus food nearing the expiry date, as well as their favourite healthy recipes. The main application dashboard includes two core features; listing offerings of food that a user wants to share with people nearby, and an option to post a personal recipe. Alongside these two core features, there is a tab featuring a map, where we aim for users to locate the rough locations of certain offerings on the map tab, containing estimates of distances.

By connecting people through food, it not only offers a practical solution to food waste, but also helps users make informed, health-conscious dietary choices, all while maintaining a community feel; after all, who wouldn’t want to connect through food?

How we built it

Building our project primarily consisted of front-end tools, most prominently TypeScript, HTML5 and CSS3, and was built using Ionic’s Angular framework. We have also briefly constructed the mapping system using the Google Maps API in the map tab on the dashboard. While we initially wanted to develop a website, we wanted to go even beyond and set ourselves a challenge by attempting a mobile application. Doing so has resulted in stepping out of our comfort zone and using this Hackathon to discover and learn the fundamentals of a new framework, even if we could not make it fully functional.

Challenges we ran into

Throughout the entirety of the project during the Hackathon, we have faced a variety of struggles that although prevented us from establishing a SQL database system, taught us the priceless experience of keeping a resilient mindset in the face of technical challenges.

Our use of version control also caused us some hiccups due to certain merge-conflicts that took more than we wanted to wrap our heads around, though the satisfying moment of overcoming them led to even more momentum and motivation to keep developing and designing our project than before.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

The fact that we managed to primarily design and build an app that enables individuals to contribute to less food waste right through their phones already makes us very proud of what we can come up with and how we can gradually design and push it onto production.

One specific accomplishment that we enjoyed was getting the Google Maps API working and ready to use on the mobile app. At first this seemed like a daunting task to us first-years who were all quite unsure about creating a mobile app, let alone using third party APIs. Learning how to design and use all these different platforms seemed daunting, though with gradual research and trial and error, we were able to slowly but surely develop our skills and confidence with these new technologies, which we are excited to use in future projects.

What we learned

Teamwork was a key part that we believe many seem to undervalue when it comes to the success of a project. While functionality is definitely an important aspect, we gradually noticed that good team chemistry was essential to staying productive throughout the project and resilient through problems that we encounter, and thus is essentially the deciding factor on how productive a team will perform.

Our use of Git and GitHub for version control was also definitely a challenging yet rewarding experience. While we knew the initial fundamentals of Git version control, combining GitHub to the VSCode environment using GitHub Desktop was a new feature that we learned that we will definitely make use of in future projects.

What’s next for Delez

As touched on before, given that we chose to make a mobile application, we had a lot of trouble establishing a database system and so far only populated it manually. While we currently have limited functionality, we would definitely like to further develop this initiative by fully implementing a secure database for the back-end using MySQL, possibly paired with PHP to perform queries on the database.

We would also consider adding new features like smaller, community groups in which people can regularly share food to each other. This could apply to student accommodations for example, or even individual flats! All in all, while we are happy with what we have designed and partly built, we truly believe in the scope of our initiative and aim to continue building it after this Hackathon finishes.