Stats
According to data issued in December 2023 by the nonprofit ReFED, 38% of the 235M tons of food produced in 2022 in the United States became surplus food. Surplus food is
food unsold or not eaten. From this, 77.6M tons of food were food waste. At the same time, according to USDA Economic Research Service, 44.2 million people lived in food-insecure households in the United States, and an additional 11.7 million adults lived in households with very low food security in the same year.
Such a stark paradox intrigued me, and I felt compelled to step into action and bring my contributions to alleviating this complex and consequential issue. I founded Scholars4Impact, a nonprofit that empowers high school students to engage in volunteering activities, such as facilitating surplus food donations from restaurants to food banks. To scale impact, I developed Food4All, an app prototype that connects restaurants with food banks: restaurants upload real-time information on food inventory, classified in perishable and non-perishable, and the app matches it with food banks based on location and demand. The app removes the communication barriers between supply and demand and accelerates the pace of donations.
That’s how Food4All was born.
Flow Diagram
Food4All is a versatile app developed using Figma that seamlessly connects restaurants with food surplus with entities in need of food deliveries, such as food banks, donation centers and other nonprofit entities.
The app has the capability of collecting multitude data elements, such as food surplus and demand by product, location, quantity, and type (perishable, non-perishable).
The app is in the prototype phase, and upon more feedback and validation from both food distributors and food providers, I plan to build the backend connectivity and to make it available using Google Play Store.
The diagram below describes the key structural elements of the app.
