STEM-In-Action Spring Scoop: Food Finders

It's time to check in with another STEM-In-Action Grant winning team! If this is your first Spring Scoop, the U.S. Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP) awards STEM-In-Action Grants of up to $5,000 to eCYBERMISSION teams that wish to further develop and implement their projects in their communities. Typically, only five teams receive a STEM-In-Action grant, but this year ten teams took home the award. This week, Food Finders Adithi, Abigail, and Liam are giving us an inside look at their project progress!

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Hey! This is Liam, Abigail, and Adithi from team Food Finders in North Carolina. As a quick reminder, we are working on creating and implementing an app to redistribute excess produce from grocery stores to hunger relief organizations.

In the last couple of months, we have made significant progress in developing our app. We interviewed and hired a developer to assist with coding. With the help of the developer, we added features including a login page, item catalog, and add to cart feature. The developer mainly worked on the backend side of the app while our team focused on creating an aesthetic and interactive frontend. The only feature we need for our app to be complete is a checkout feature, so grocery stores can let volunteers know they need to deliver produce. 

On the implementation front, we are working on incorporating a nonprofit to gain credibility and get grocery stores and hunger relief nonprofits to partner with us. Additionally, stores will be incentivized to participate in our program because donating to a nonprofit gives them tax breaks and improves brand image. Our target date to finish filing as a nonprofit is March 18th. Before filing we want to make sure that we understand any legal liabilities and responsibilities associated with becoming a nonprofit.

Throughout this year, our main goal has been to make connections with potential partners and to finish the code to our website. Our main challenge has been managing our developer and making sure progress is made in our app. Our most recent setback in this category was our developer quitting. For this reason, we are now enlisting the help of one of our friends to finish the project. Our other main problem is in making connections with nonprofits and grocery stores. Grocery stores have been reluctant to consider our idea, and our lack of a website makes it difficult to legitimize our project. 

Due to constraints in our original plan, we have considered a few alterations to our original plan. For the initial stages of our plan, it is possible to bypass the app and just connect a provider and a receiver. Given our problems with the speed of development, this may allow us to help our community before we have a working website. We have also been considering partnering with a nonprofit to make our goals more realistic. By partnering with a more credible group, we can boost the likelihood that a grocery store will take us seriously and use our service to donate produce to schools. 

As stated before, we hope to finish becoming a nonprofit by March 18. This is our most immediate and short-term goal. Becoming a non-profit will give us more credibility and make it easier to partner with grocery stores. Simultaneously, we will be working to finish our app and make it user friendly. Our long-term goals are to recruit all the necessary parties (grocery stores and produce recipients) for our app and conduct at least one transfer of produce. By this summer and the end of our grant, we hope to have a significant amount of deliveries. From there we will re-evaluate whether our program can function on its own, if we want to continue and if we will need more funding from other sources. 

We are so thankful to eCybermission for this opportunity to work on our projects and implement it in the real world. We had so much fun watching our idea come to life and are excited to continue seeing it into completion. We hope to make a positive impact in our community!

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Feeding the hungry while decreasing food waste? Talk about a win-win! The progress that Food Finders is making legitimizing their app, collaborating with grocery stores, schools, and nonprofits (or even becoming one themselves), and setting goals is nothing short of mind-blowing. Good job, team!

Faith Benner
AEOP Senior Communications and Marketing Specialist