#1: On Food Wastage

According to the Singapore National Environmental Agency (NEA), Singapore has generated about 791 000 tonnes of food waste in 2016, with a recycling rate of 14%; equivalent to about 140 kg of food waste produced by each person – or two full bowls of rice thrown into the trash daily. This poses a problem as food is wasted when it is not consumed.

As Singapore proceeds to become a Smart Nation, it is essential for us to solve our existing problems first. Large amounts of food wastage can indirectly hinder our progress as a country.

Problems Faced

Here are some issues that food wastage pose:

1. Social Implications – the ethical value of food is questioned when Singaporeans throw away excess food when most of these food are still edible upon the time of discard.

2. Economic Implications – the fundamental idea behind the impact of food wastage on the economy is simple – food costs money, food gets thrown away, and therefore, money is indirectly getting thrown away too.

3. Environmental Implications – Food waste is exceedingly degrading for the environment. It is also one the largest emitters of greenhouse gases.

With an increasing need to tackle this problem with food wastage, our team has decided to take up the challenge to solve this problem in a fun way that can engage consumers and businesses altogether. With the creation of our proposed application, FoodTree, we focus on how F&B companies throw away excess food into the trash daily and use this problem to our advantage.

How FoodTree Works

On the user’s side, FoodTree can help to locate participating food places such as Break Talk, and many others. We have decided to target these such companies as there is a higher probability that they have excess food at the end of the day.

After signing in, users can first select their favourite participating food stores that they wish to receive push notifications from, which can then send out alerts for their products during non-peak hours, or during closing period, at a discounted rate. This feature comes with a built-in function that can allow these companies to select the specific time (e.g. every Saturday at 10 am) that they wish to automate these notifications. On days that they wish to stop these notifications from sending out, all they have to do is to open the application and click on the option that enables them to disable the sending of notifications. In the event users do not wish to enable push notifications, they will then be sent directly to their in-app inbox and only be able to read these alerts when they open the app.

For food companies that are not very frequented, FoodTree comes with a free and paid ‘boost’ function that can allow companies to send out notifications through the application to the user’s phone, overwriting the user’s preferences settings only in that point of time.

What is included:

• GPS System

• Filtering Options

• Customisation

• Rewards System

• Tracker

• Signal Boosts

• Feedback/Rating

Users can get updated with the latest discounts and offers happening around them. Businesses can also benefit by reducing the amount of leftover food that they have at the end of each day, and rake in profits from the customers that they may not have received in the past.

The following image depicts our expected timeline for this project.

System Design

We will be making use of Sketch to design our application's user interface, and use Swift (XCode) to code the actual application.

Anticipated Results

We hope to see the problem of food wastage in Singapore gradually improve, particularly on the F&B companies’ side. We would like our application to cater to a diverse category of people by including a wide variety of F&B businesses into our application. We hope that one day we will be able to include places such as hawker centers into FoodTree so that the problem with food wastage would definitely improve. If you're thinking: Wow, there sure are many limitations to this idea... – fret not, for some of these limitations will be addressed in some of my next few posts!

If you have any burning questions or suggestions for our application, kindly leave them in the comment box below or drop me an email!

My next post will be regarding our application's UI design process!

Till then!

Wan Ning x