App to help donate excess food to the needy

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Restaurants, caterers and others will be able to easily donate excess food to the needy through a new mobile application developed by students of Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology-Delhi.

The app called Zero provides an interface between caterers/restaurant owners and NGOs involved in distributing excess food from eateries and will help prevent wastage, according to its makers.

"A donor can register on the app and generate a request to pick up the leftover food. A notification on it then goes to the volunteers of the NGOs who can distribute food," IIIT-D M. Tech student Chetna Wadhwa said.

The idea was incepted and developed early this year by a group of M Tech students including Mallika Gupta, Akshara Rai, Ruchika Lakhina, Pallavi Rawat and V N Dawarka apart from Wadhwa who have experience of working with an NGO for a similar cause.

"Struck by the fact that tonnes of food was being wasted everyday when millions were starving prompted us to build the interface. We interviewed various stakeholders,like the caterers and dhaba and restaurant owners regarding food wastage, and some NGOs and college students to know about their willingness to distribute food among the needy," says Wadhwa said.

Zero is currently in the final stages of testing and the team hopes to release it in the app store soon.

"The idea was to build a simple interface such that all the stakeholders could access it smoothly. We developed the design of our app in various iterations with proper feedback and applying all the techniques and knowledge we learnt during our course Designing Human Centered Systems(DHCS) ," Wadhwa said.