Week-5 Report (Food NextDoor)

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 Week-5 Report (Food NextDoor)

June 28, 2025

My focus this week was on broadening our project by suggesting an idea that lends itself to our aim of tackling the problems of food waste and food accessibility - a Community Fridge Locator and Booking System.

The idea was spurred by Starr's own research into local food-sharing projects, where community fridges are emerging as an increasingly popular grassroots solution. By adding a map-based fridge locator to our system, users will be able to see where there are community fridges near them, what is available or needed at which fridges, and they can even claim space to drop off their food. This sort of system can be very helpful for smaller food businesses or supermarkets, or anyone wishing to give away perishables in a speedy, organised fashion.

In our group meeting, we put some thoughts on how this new module may be implemented, and those components include the following:

Map Integration (e.g., Google Maps API) to search and visualize community fridges

Access and Status of Individual Fridges (full, space available, on hold)

Fridge Booking Now you can schedule a time for food drop off

Admin Controls for fridge owners, volunteers to manage status and hygiene notifications

I also conducted research into open-source projects and local apps with a comparable feature set; along with the possibility of integrating Firebase in order to provide real-time updates.

We added a new row for this module in our Trello board and started drawing wireframes for it. This new addition go perfectly with our dream of creating a food-sharing system that is socially effective and scalable.

References

Love Food Hate Waste. (n.d.). Community Fridge Projects. https://www.lovefoodhatewaste.com

Google, Maps API – https://developers.google.com/maps

Firebase – https://firebase.google.com 

OLIO – https://olioex.com

– Sagar Chaudhary

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