Potluck (Sustainability)

Environment & Sustainability - Optimising Surplus Food Re-distribution

We Build For Food! We love to eat and hate to see good food feed the landfill instead of our tummies.

Using our flair for data crunching, nifty scripting, and mindful bots, we aim to share surplus food with as many foodies as possible, one byte at a time!

Team members:

• Ho Binjin Misty, PM

• Trevor Ong Yee Siang, Software Engineer

• Don Chia Qi En, Software Engineer

• Tan Wei Shaun, Software Engineer

• Isaac Chen Jing De, Software Engineer

Problem Statement

Ask anyone about their favourite dishes and Singaporeans will tell you their go-to places for the best nasi lemak or sushi. We’re a nation of foodies, but did you know that food waste continues to rank as one of the largest waste streams in Singapore? Just last year, 755 million kg of food waste was generated, accounting for 11% of all waste in the country.

Social enterprises and food rescue missions have sprung up to divert as much food as possible away from our landfills, and to the tummies of regular folks like you and I instead, as well as to beneficiaries in need. In this whole-of-society effort, food businesses who wish to donate surplus food need to indicate the amount, and food rescue organisations need to effectively relay this information to their volunteers. As different merchants have different operational processes and schedules, information is captured manually, and the flow of communications between stakeholders can be slow and inefficient.

A more conducive experience might encourage more F&B establishments to play their part in reducing food waste on a national scale. How might we improve the end-to-end process and ensure smoother food rescue operations, thereby onboarding more businesses to redistribute surplus food through organisations in the food surplus/waste space?

Proposed Solution

We propose an integrated digital platform designed to optimise surplus food redistribution operations between the three main groups of stakeholders.

1. Donors (food businesses): Giving them the ability to easily create listings of available surplus food with photos, tags and collection time-frame
2. Volunteers: Automated matching to suitable collection windows
3. Rescue group coordinators: Dashboard and logging systems to provide an oversight of listings and collection status through real-time updates

By reducing the administrative burden and increasing the efficiency of these missions, more businesses and organisations will be encouraged to join the food waste reduction movement, contributing to Singapore’s Zero Waste Masterplan targets.