Abstract— 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.
I.INTRODUCTION
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.
II.LITERATURE
REVIEW
According to [5], food
waste is a significant issue around the world. It is predicted through a survey
that more than 58 percent of food that people produce for consumption is wasted
every day. Whereas, more than 60 percent of people in the third world countries
are dying in malnutrition without proper food for a living. Therefore, the
technologically developed countries are emphasizing more on this issue.
Therefore, that less food can be wasted and can be distributed to the needy
people. According to [6] in the age of modern era, where we are developed through
artificial intelligence, people are more dependent on the smartphone. There are
various applications, which are developed to control the huge wastage of food,
and it provides the opportunity to send that extra food to the people who need
it. There are multiple applications, which control food waste. The most useful
food waste application for android and apple are discussed below:
A.Food waste
application of Singapore (11th Hour)
Tan Jun Yuan who is a
food stall hawker from Singapore felt very bad noticing that people waste so
much food in every year. He saw many vendors with leftover foods in a day. The
quantity was 10 to 15 bowl of pork ribs served including other foods that he served
the customers per day. He also saw that more than 35 percent of food he made
every day was left as extra. Therefore, he created the application named 11Th
Hour. This application provides the left and unused foods at the half of their
original price before the restaurants are closed. After the creation of this
application, there were almost 20000 downloads of this application [7].
B.Food waste reduction
application from Netherlands (NoFoodWasted)
August de Vocht, a
citizen of Netherlands developed this application to reduce the amount of food
waste. This application makes collaboration with the supermarket so that people
can be aware of the foods that will be expired very soon. According to [8], it
helps the users to upload their grocery items, which will expire soon so that
people who are in need of food can buy them at a reduced price and use them. It
helps to stop the wastage of excessive foods. More than 20000 people have found
this application useful, and it has reduced the amount of food wastage in the
Netherlands.
C.An application to
control food waste by UK and Ireland (FoodCloud)
This application has
been declared as one of the useful food wastage application in the United
Kingdom as well as Ireland. This application notifies the supermarkets about
their surplus food so that the charitable societies can collect them and reduce
the chances of food wastage. This application works as an intermediate that
provides the type of foods and arranges the pick-up for the charities. It also
collects and stores the food so that the charitable societies can collect the
food according to their requirements. According to [9] more than 1200 business
hubs and 3000 charitable societies work under this application to provide
excess foods to the homeless people.
D.Food wastage
Reduction Application from Africa (Cheetah)
Some researchers from
the University of Twente have developed this application to reduce the number
of food wastages in Africa. It is seen that various fruits and vegetables lose
their ability to be consumed due to poor road circumstances, less refrigeration
in Africa. This application is created to gather those food items before they
get rotten and distribute it to the needy malnutrition people of Africa. Dutch
Ministry of Foreign Affairs helped the researchers in the development of this
application. Mostly, farmers, the food transporters use this application, and
it also helped them to reduce the chances of food bribing in Africa. It is
expected that the public version of this application will be released within
May, next year [10].
E.Indian Food Wastage
Reduction Application (No Food Waste)
No Food waste is an
application from India that allows the restaurants, food stalls and parties to
inform about their excessive leftover foods so that needy people can collect
them for their usage. This application collects those foods and distributes
those among the homeless people, slum dwellers and orphanages as well as
nursing homes. According to [11], the users can also notify them by showing
hunger points, and they will distribute the foods to there. The only
requirement is they take foods only if it is prepared two hours before. These
applications have changed the use of artificial intelligence by providing food
to the needy people. It is considered one of the best uses of software
development. However, food wastage is still a bad habit. According to [12],
people need to be more careful while preparing or ordering food because many
people around the world do not get to eat. Food wastage reduction has decreased
a lot due to the usage of this application, but people need to be more
sensitive and careful so that a better world can be created where no food is
wasted.
III.CONCLUSION
AND FUTURE WORK
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)
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