PROJECT TITLE
The Nourish Network: Providing Food Banks with Automated Inventory Management, Online Ordering and Logistical Sorting Machines
PROJECT GOAL: The inequity we are addressing is the difficulties people in low-income communities face acquiring food when needed, due to an inefficient and confusing food bank system. This is our proposed solution for United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 2, Zero Hunger, specifically target 2.1. We chose this inequity because food is a necessity, and while we can’t provide the food, we can help those who can provide it do so more efficiently.
The solution that we have proposed is an app that allows food bank staff to update and manage inventory and clients to order the things they need. We also plan to develop a piece of hardware and a machine learning model that can actually physically sort through inventory to find the items in a specific order. Anyone with an account will be able to place an order, selecting from only the items available in the quantities currently in stock. That order will be automatically picked from the inventory. Staff will be able to simply bring the items to the client and the inventory will be updated to reflect the new stock quantities. This will address the needs of staff because they will have a centralized inventory tool that largely maintains itself and automatically sorts online orders. Clients will have a low-stress way of obtaining food in the quantities they need.
