Impact Case ​

Team: AAAP ​

Amanda Zheng, Andrew Woo, Anna Zhang, Peilin Chen aaap@mit.edu

Team Contract ​

• Expected Level of Achievement: A
• Expected Time: 30 hours per individual per assignment
• Personal goals for each team member:
  • Amanda: I would like to make an impact in the community with whatever product I build by considering the needs of the people the app is serving.
  • Anna: I hope to gain experience in applying the ideas learned in this class to build impactful apps while collaborating with peers.
  • Andrew: I hope to gain more experience in working with multi-platform app development workflows.
  • Peilin: I aim to leverage my software design skills to create an app that makes a positive social impact.
• Meeting Style: Zoom, two to three times a week, additional minor meetings throughout
• Code Quality Maintenance: Cross Integration Tests → each member performs tests on pieces of code they didn’t work on
• Task Assignment: Divide tasks during the first meeting of the week. Raise issues and reallocate tasks if deadlines are missed. Communicate our situation with TAs and get their view.
• If there is a disagreement, the majority vote wins, but if there is a tie, we will consult the TAs to unblock progress.

Impact Case: Draft ​

      We will address the challenges of the food security paradox, which refers to food waste and scarcity coexisting on a global scale, despite their contradictory nature. A hundred billion pounds of food is wasted in the United States alone each year, but 12.8% of the population suffered from food insecurity issues in 2022. Restaurants in the US throw out 84.3% of unused food and only donate about 1.4%. Approximately 43% of food waste comes from households while restaurants, grocery stores, and food service companies contribute to 40% of all food waste.
      Our hypothesis is that restaurants are throwing out used food because it is past the “expiration,” date which is not when food becomes inedible but when the quality deteriorates. On the other hand, we suspect that individuals often waste food due to forgetfulness or not knowing how to use up certain items quickly, resulting in eventual disposal. Additionally, we assume that low donation rates are influenced by the belief that finding food donation centers is inconvenient and out of their way.
      Our app aims to empower both large restaurants and individuals to manage food waste efficiently. It offers real-time inventory tracking, expiration date notifications, and personalized recipes for soon-to-expire ingredients, ensuring optimal resource utilization. Furthermore, it simplifies food donation to local organizations, bridging the gap between surplus food and food insecurity. With user-friendly features and educational content, the app promotes sustainable consumption, addressing the food security paradox at all levels.
      Our solution seems viable because utilizing soon-to-expire food with higher priority would maximize storage time for all food items. This would lead to lower wasted shelf-life for each individual food item, leading to an overall decrease in food waste. For the individual consumer, the amount of food items would be smaller, making them easier to manage. For a restaurant scale, the food items come in larger quantities but in a more organized inventory, which would be also implementable.
      We can measure the effectiveness of our solution by evaluating the increase in the number of households fed due to our app. Meanwhile, to assess the impact on food waste reduction, we can conduct a comparative study between households that use our app and those that do not. In this study, we will provide both sets of households with the same groceries for a specific period, and then we can measure the difference in food waste between the two groups.

Research Findings ​

Existing Resources ​

News and other Evidence ​

Interview Roles ​

#1: Liu Jin Quan ​

Liu Jin Quan, along with his wife, operates a Seafood restaurant in Florida, making him a key stakeholder in our project. We are keen to interview him because of the scale of the food he has to manage. Moreover, given the fluctuating customer demand, it is challenging to estimate how much food to order. The limited shelf life of seafood adds to this complexity because it often necessitates disposal to avoid potential health concerns. Furthermore, reusing excess seafood is constrained compared to other ingredients, compounding the efforts to reduce waste.

#2: Phoebe Heyman ​

Phoebe Heyman is the Food Pantry Coordinator at Margaret Fuller House. Phoebe, who helps provide food for over 6000 individuals and families annually, can illuminate the challenges associated with maintaining this substantial yet vital food supply. Additionally, since the Margaret Fuller House supplies foods to families every other week, there are likely established storage and handling procedures in place to portion out and ensure the freshness and safety of the food. Lastly, given the regulatory framework governing food donations, we are interested in seeing what food donations are acceptable, which will help evaluate the feasibility of our project.

#3: Jonathan Krones ​

Dr. Krones is a professor working in environmental studies at BC, and has received a doctorate from MIT in Engineering Systems. His work includes papers on food waste management analysis such as “Patterns in municipal food scrap programming in mid-sized U.S. cities.” As he is an expert in the field of tracking and studying solutions for managing food waste, his expertise could educate us on the sources, scale, and challenges of solving the food waste issue.

#4: Jim Lachance ​

Jim Lachance is an experienced Executive Chef with a long-standing affiliation with MIT’s dining services. He has been dedicated to culinary operations since the age of 13. As the current Executive Chef, Jim is responsible for menu planning, staff supervision, and food supply management. We seek to interview Jim as his insights are crucial to understanding factors contributing to food waste in buffet-style dining halls. Jim’s historic affiliation and extensive involvement in dining services can shed light on potential causes of food waste, existing practice, and opportunities for improvement.

Interviews & Summaries of Key Lessons ​

Interview Plans And Notes

#1: Liu Jin Quan ​

      Liu Jin Quan shared valuable insights into how businesses handle food waste and managing their inventory. He emphasized that restaurants, like his own, are vigilant about managing expiration dates to prevent serving expired food, which could result in significant losses and potential lawsuits due to government regulations. Specifically, he could be charged up to 1 to 2 million dollars in medical insurance. Unlike larger food chains, smaller restaurants have less room for error. As a result, many seafood suppliers allow refunds on unopened crates of seafood. Liu Jin Quan utilizes this and returns unopened crates when he foresees that the food may expire before it can be used. He emphasized that minimizing food waste is directly correlated to the margin of profit so it motivates restaurants to reduce thrown out food. Additionally, frozen seafood's extended shelf life, lasting several months to half a year, allows him to have more time to use up his inventory. In the rare instances of large quantities of food expiring, it is typically associated with unpredictable natural disasters causing power outages that cause the freezers to stop working. Other minor contributions to food waste primarily occur when customers are dissatisfied with their meals and have to be thrown away as it is unsuitable for others. With regard to inventory tracking, it is not overly burdensome for his business, as he orders for half the year and only makes significant inventory changes twice a year, with the rest of the year involving gradual updates based on sales.
      This interview was really valuable as it showed that local restaurants are more active about preventing food waste than we originally thought. Moreover, inventory tracking was presumed to be tedious and repetitive, but the interview revealed that large scale inventory changes in restaurants do not happen frequently. However, it did offer an interesting issue of how to combat food spoilage due to natural disasters. Perhaps, there is a device that could detect abnormalities such as increase in heat, excess rain or keeps track of news of hurricanes that could alert the restaurant in advance about possible food spoilage and food waste.

#2: Phoebe Heyman ​

      The Margaret Fuller House Food Pantry serves a diverse population of families and individuals with thousands of pounds of food each week, with about 5-10% coming from donations from corporations, individuals, or other groups.
      While additional donations to the Food Pantry would of course be useful, Phoebe’s main concerns for the pantry were unrelated to receiving more food inventory. Instead, they were logistical issues that we immediately took interest in, deeming them high-impact, approachable, and necessary. Currently, the pantry’s registration system is in the form of physical cards, with one card per family, and a limit of three visits per month. Much of the process is manual; the amount of times patrons have visited, dietary restrictions, household size, and inventory are logged on paper, but mostly rely on Phoebe’s own memory. The overhead of changing to a new technology-driven system, as well as the low-budget nature of a non-profit, have maintained the antiquated system. This results in high fraud; some users will try to disguise themselves or use a friend’s card to come more than the allowed times. Furthermore, the pantry faces challenges in allocating varying amounts of food to patrons, since each household is under a single registration card despite household size, and inventory is tracked informally only at the end of the day. Additionally, many patrons speak no English, so the pantry also faces challenges with communicating rules.
      Following Phoebe’s interview, we feel inspired to tackle some of these challenges that the Margaret Fuller House, and many other food pantries, face everyday. We believe that combating the food security paradox will be better achieved through improving the problem for those facing food insecurity from the root cause — the underlying system of food pantries — rather than redistributing food to them once it’s already been wasted.

#3: Jonathan Krones ​

      Dr. Krones has moved away from food waste related research over the years, to more of a broader study on Environmental Science. However, he still provided substantial and valuable insights, as his research was mostly on the policies and methods for food waste recycling.
      Dr. Krones recommended ReFED as a reputable source of further information, but noted that most food waste research data is filled with assumptions and non-factual data. Additionally, he noted that state-wide policies were already implemented for large-scale food waste collection; for example, in MA, any institution that generates more than a ton of food waste a week is prevented from sending it to landfills/incinerators and must find other options such as composting. There has been plenty of work on the policy-side of food-waste recycling, which may be out of scope for this project.
      Next, he stated that food waste is a huge, multifaceted issue, and choosing the biggest issue to solve would be folly. Expiration dates would be a useful issue to tackle, as they are small enough to be in scope, while still contributing a significant amount to the larger issue at hand. As food waste normally occurs at the overconsumption stage in richer countries, our initial solution would be perfect. Unfortunately, expiration dates are very unclear and not legally binding. Although they are not tools of planned obsolescence, stated expiration dates are always determined in an extremely conservative manner to protect brand value from accusations of low quality or expired food.
      To create a larger impact, a more dynamic approach would be needed than simple reminders, as simply being past the expiration date doesn’t mean a food item is inedible. Implementing a method to regularly update estimates for when foods might have crossed the threshold of needing to be discarded would be necessary for this solution, which poses a larger negative impact due to potential health risks and need for more user input. A more hardware based solution such as the smart containers startups being deployed at a retail level (non-consumer) would be more effective for this path, rather than a heavily user-oriented notification system.

#4: Jim Lachance ​

      In the interview with Jim Lachance at MIT dining, we gained insights into the dining hall’s effective strategies for managing food waste. Jim, an experienced chef, understands the significance of minimizing food waste.
      To avoid food waste on dining hall level, MIT dining staff employ techniques that aim to conserve the amount of food used. For instance, they utilize data-driven planning by examining historical and special occasion data to determine food quantities, which helps in preventing overproduction. They also employ batch cooking, ensuring that they prepare just the right amount of food. Moreover, they choose to collaborate with local farmers which enables them to order food in precise quantities, further reducing waste.
      MIT dining also tries to reduce inedible food waste through composting. Students are encouraged to segregate food waste into recycling, trash, and compost bins. Likewise, in the kitchen, in order to remind chefs to prioritize composting in the midst of preparing thousands of meals, different colored bags are used to distinguish between compostable and non-compostable items.
      Lastly, the dining halls even have initiatives to address food insecurity. Jim noted that there was significantly less waste when the dining hall was retail style because portion control was dictated by the cost of each item, but buffet-style dining is a more equitable choice to combat food insecurity. Most importantly, all dining halls with any surplus food left unconsumed by students are kept frozen for donations. Organizations like Food for Free pick up these frozen leftovers and repurpose them into meals for underprivileged students. Jim's insights shed light on how MIT dining combines thoughtful planning, responsible waste sorting, and collaboration with food donation organizations to efficiently manage food waste.
      There are several key opportunities for an app that aims to further reduce food waste in MIT dining halls. For example, it could boost student awareness and engagement, providing daily tips and portion control reminders. It could also simplify real-time feedback on waste management, allowing kitchen staff to input data for analysis. Additionally, it could optimize inventory management and order processes, ensuring supplies match demand.

VSD Analysis ​

Stakeholders ​

• Variation in Human Ability: Some volunteers may have visual impairments or limited English proficiency, impacting their ability to use the app effectively. This also creates a longer wait time for the people they are serving. To enhance inclusivity and efficiency, we can consider adding images alongside item names and quantities.
• Changing hands: As mentioned by Phoebe in the interviews, Food Pantry volunteers and administration changes hands multiple times. Therefore, having just one account for each organization might cause unintended consequences when someone that leaves the organization can still access the. One way to mitigate this is to allow creation and deletion of multiple accounts under one organization each with their own login information.

Time ​

• Adaptation: App may not fully account for the diverse dietary restrictions and preferences of individual users. This lack of personalization can be particularly problematic for individuals with allergies, intolerances, or change of dietary restrictions (e.g., vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free) as the recommendations may not align with their specific needs. An approach should consider the dynamic nature of dietary requirements and offer options for users to easily modify their profiles.

Values ​

• Choose Desired Values: Our current system idea enables Food Pantry administration to search for patrons by their names. Nevertheless, this functionality raises concerns related to potential discrimination and privacy issues. For example, many names may inadvertently divulge sensitive information like race and ethnicity, which could lead to unintended consequences. To address these concerns, we could restrict searches solely to unique ID numbers, to prevent volunteers from obtaining sensitive information.
• Value Tensions: The introduction of patron IDs and photos for security purposes in food pantry operations presents a value tension between enhanced security and patron privacy. While this approach can prevent fraud and ensure equitable food distribution, it also raises concerns about inclusivity, data privacy, and access barriers. Striking a balance between these values is crucial, and this may involve implementing strong data security measures, providing alternative identification methods such as security questions or personal signatures.

Pervasiveness ​

• Widespread Use: To cater to food pantries in regions with non-English-speaking volunteers, the app will offer multilingual support, allowing text to be translated into various languages.

Revised Impact Case ​

      The challenges faced by food pantry operations have been exacerbated by the far-reaching impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Feeding America, a non-profit organization, has experienced an astonishing 50% increase in demand for food across its network of 200 food banks. This surge in patrons has placed an unprecedented strain on food pantries, making it increasingly challenging to meet the growing need. These food pantries have funding constraints that hinder their ability to provide competitive salaries, leading to high turnover rates which makes these organizations reliant on volunteer labor. However, volunteers introduce instability into their operations. Phoebe states in the interview that even amongst the executives, understaffing issues persist with frequent turnover. She also underscores the difficulties of managing inventory effectively, striving to ensure that everyone receives the essential items they require. Due to limited funding, she currently employs a rudimentary paper-based system for tracking inventory,compounded by the inconsistent nature of donations. For instance, while Phoebe notes that only 5% of the inventory in the current year came from donations, in May 2020, one of Feeding America's affiliates received double the volume of inbound requests compared to the previous year. Lack of donations creates problems of stretching out limited inventory while excess donations overwhelms the pantry volunteers’ capacity to sort, store, and distribute food. Lastly, a large population of food insecurity comes from immigrants. In fact, in a study done in Massachusetts in 2020, 78% of households with at least one undocumented family member required food assistance. Phoebe notes that many of these immigrants have limited or no proficiency in English, making it challenging to find volunteers who can effectively communicate with them to ensure their needs are met. These issues are not only challenging for the pantries themselves but also have significant consequences for the individuals and communities they serve.
      Our solution to address this problem is the development of an innovative app, which modernizes and streamlines food pantry operations. According to McKinsey, “food banks can improve throughput by at least 20 percent to 30 percent by streamlining their warehousing”. To address the problem of high turnover rate of volunteers as well as simplify pantry inventory management, our app will manage the food pantry inventory with a dynamic database and optimize food distribution based on patrons’ particular needs. This will enable volunteers to require less training time and utilize their time at the pantry more efficiently. The inventory tracking feature will also allow them to be less dependent on the executives to distribute inventory throughout the week or memorize patrons' needs, thereby speeding up the food distribution process. Moreover, this feature will help tackle the problem of distributing food equally amongst the patrons based on their household details and dietary restrictions as each patron’s needs will be stored with their profile, ensuring smooth operations. Our app will also include features that aim to address the language barrier problem by having stored audio files and translators in different languages to enable any volunteer to communicate with the patrons. Our app will aid food pantries in providing a more equitable food distribution and making the process of visiting the pantry much more convenient.
      We could measure the app's success by analyzing key metrics relating to food insecurity, such as increase in speed of serving patrons at the pantry, increase in number of patrons served, decrease in spendings on inventory of the food pantry, and the reduced number of fraud cases at the pantry.

References ​

• https://www.feedingamerica.org/our-work/reduce-food-waste
• https://www.un.org/en/chronicle/article/losing-25000-hunger-every-day
• https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-u-s/key-statistics-graphics/
• https://www.npr.org/2020/09/27/912486921/food-insecurity-in-the-u-s-by-the-numbers
• https://www.fourth.com/article/how-much-food-restaurants-waste
• https://www.feedingamerica.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/National Projections Brief_3.9.2021_0.pdf