Dreams of r̶e̶d̶u̶c̶i̶n̶g̶ eliminating food waste.
According to a blog post on rubicon.com, found here, food waste has grown to the monumental amount of 103 million tons in the United States. That is 81.4 billion, with a ‘b’, pounds of food that goes to waste. Approximately one pound of food per person a day. A staggering amount, but if you drive through many, if not all, metropolitan cities, you’ll find someone on the side of the road begging for food, or unseen to the masses, in their homes with little to nothing to eat.
There are a myriad of proposed ideas to help food waste that have been gaining traction, especially with the help of large corporations such as Microsoft and its founders, Bill Gates & Paul Allen. One foundation worth mentioning is the recently spotlighted Goodr.
Today, Jasmine is CEO and founder of Goodr, whose mission is to feed more and waste less. The organization equips businesses with technology that lets them track their food surplus and turn it into donations to feed their local communities.
It’s initiatives such as these, and the countless lesser-known others, that attempt to offset the heavily weighted scale that I would like to add my own weight to. I have the dream to one day polish my software engineering skills and expand my network enough to be able to enact my idea to help r̶e̶d̶u̶c̶e eliminate food waste.
Countless Americans throw out rotten, expired, or stale portions of their hard earned groceries. My idea has a somewhat “simple” premise, but one that will require a large network to make a reality.
At the end of every transaction, store wise, a receipt is given by a machine that has processed every barcode of the items in your cart or buggy. Now, normally most barcodes we see are 1D. Reading through a bytescout blog post it states:
Linear barcodes can hold anywhere between 8–25 characters… It is for this sole reason that many businesses settle within a range of 8–15 characters, which keeps the barcode at a respectable and printable size.
This is a small amount of space we have to work with, especially with the names of the products already taking up much, if not all of that character length. However, that’s not the only way we can create barcodes. The barcode growing in popularity across the world is the QR code, capable of storing 4296 characters and 7089 digits.
Quick Response Code (QR Code) is a type of a 2D matrix barcode trademark. It was invented in Japan in 1994 for use in the automotive industry. Like a barcode, QR code is an optical label that contains information attached to it. They’re machine-readable.
My idea is this: Barcodes that store the expiration or best-by date of all food and food related items purchased located at the bottom of every receipt. With this scannable barcode, I want to develop software that will aide in eliminating food waste.
For instance, the most obvious utilization being a notification or reminder that food in your pantry or refrigerator is getting closer to being unsafe to consume. Pair this with the capability to suggest recipes that require them and we are already making progress. That’s just the beginning though. With any amount of data gathered we can improve our lives in some way or another. Another example of how this idea could benefit every American is by tracking your purchases and how fast we go through particular items.
In small, households could come to realize they purchase milk or eggs on a regular basis of 2 weeks and instead of thinking “well I’ll just pick up another carton since I’m already out” and waste a quarter of it, they’ll be able to plan accordingly to purchase it at better interval. In large, it could extend to the amount of food we ask the farmers of America, or importers to obtain at a specific time of the year.
A small barcode and software to read, interpret and track the data related to it could unlock numerous possibilities and greatly benefit everyone. It’s a simple premise but to make it happen widespread I want and need Walmarts, Targets, Krogers, Whole Foods, Dollar Generals, and everyone in between, to make the biggest impact.
This should go without saying but, I want this to expand farther than the United States, I want all food waste to be eliminated but it has to start somewhere and this is my home, it’s what I know.
