A Food Wastage Reduction Mobile Application
Wasting food is a common problem in our society. Food waste management is crucial since it can improve our environmental and economic sustainability. We have identified the use of mobile technology to reduce food waste management and built an android mobile application that allows restaurants to donate and share their foods and leftovers with people in need. This app will enable users to register, login, view items, add items, add items to cart, remove an item from the cart, and log out. This app is using the firebase storage and real-time database. Any user in need can see all the food images donated by different users and add it to his or her cart.
Mobile phone applications have seen wide use in recent years [1, 2]. It’s known that Android is the most popular platform for mobile, right now android is used on over 190 countries in the world on millions of mobile devices. Android is the most installed platform for mobile, and the number is increasing rapidly since almost 1 million users every day purchase new Android devices and use it immediately to get digital content such as games, application, and many other services [3]. Due to that, we developed an android application “FoodReduction App” using android studio because it will reach a wider range of audience since most people nowadays use android phones. To improve the performance of the image processing algorithms, noise estimation can be used to adapt the detection step [4]. The purpose of this development is to limit the wastage of food in the United Arab Emirates. Many restaurants tend to throw the leftover food at the end of the day even though the food is perfectly fine to be eaten, which means that huge amounts of food are wasted. While all that food is being wasted, some families can barely afford proper meals with their limited money. They don’t get enough nutrition due to the lack of having three meals in a day. Therefore, we decided to create our application to link the restaurant with the unfortunate people, so instead of throwing the food, the unfortunate will be able to pick it up from the restaurant at the end of the day. The application allows the restaurants to log in, and upload an image of the meals they have as leftovers along with a description of that meal, and the location where to pick it up. The users then, can log in and choose the meal suitable to their choice and can pick it up once they send a request to the application.
Our study has investigated the problem of food waste that has many serious side effects economically and socially. However, the wastage of the food can be prevented or at least decreased using political rules and technology. Mobile application technology is beneficial for food waste management. The app aims to encourage better food management. Our proposed solution should reduce food wastage by facilitating food sharing in UAE community using mobile technology. This work is an initial step towards designing a better system to reduce daily food waste. In future, this app could be enhanced more by adding the following features: Extending our app to have many types of donating users either from organizations such as restaurants, or a family or a single user Adding the location (GPS) facility to our apps. The donating user should specify the location of the shared food. Adding the time and date of each meal shared by users Making the app supports multiple platforms (cross-platform app)