Intention

According to the US Department of Energy, there are 61.2 million tons of food waste across the United States every year, an amount that can feed 112 million people for one year. What's worse, among all the amount of food wasted, 60 million tons is avoidable, the amount that accounted for 29% of the overall annual production. Because of the development of society, food wastage has become a more and more severe issue, the overall food waste has increased by 50% during the past 45 years. With the increased accessibility to abundant resources, people tend to over-acquire and fail to consume the resources.

Within companies and governmental or educational institutes, people order food for all kinds of events and meetings. We observed that in order to minimize the risk of not getting enough food for everyone, event/meeting organizers often over-order food. In addition, especially within campuses, a lot of people are not showing up for the events they registered for, leading to the overestimated number of people for events. These phenomena happening every day and everywhere are causing a huge amount of avoidable food waste. As a result, in order to truly avoid these food waste, our project combined the IoT technology to aim at the realization of re-distributing excess food resources within communities.