Pantrymate: A Mobile Application to Reduce Household Food Waste

Abstract

Over 30% of food produced in the United States is wasted every year. This waste has far-reaching global effects, and reducing it is critical in addressing problems such as food insecurity, resource scarcity, and climate change. Within the United States’ food supply chain, household food waste is responsible for 14% of total food loss. The goal of this project is to try to reduce food waste by targeting key sources of loss at a household level. Pantrymate is a mobile grocery shopping and food management application that tracks a user’s food inventory. Using this inventory data, the application alerts users about potential instances of overbuying, food expiration, and unnecessary wasting of leftovers. Additionally, Pantrymate uses the data gathered on a user’s food inventory to help improve household nutritional awareness. Pantrymate uses a user’s shopping lists to build its inventory, and therefore takes a uniquely proactive approach in addressing the key sources of household food waste. The application design also focuses on reducing manual input requirements to lower the time threshold of use. Pantrymate has been implemented using React Native, a framework for building cross-browser mobile applications, so as to increase potential accessibility of this system to all individuals with an Android or iOS smartphone. Upon completion of this report, a working Android APK and iOS release bundle for the functioning application have been exported and tested on their respective hardware devices. In order to evaluate Pantrymate, the application’s behavior was simulated given 100 users’ grocery shopping data. Results show that Pantrymate proactively targets key factors in household food waste. Over an average of fourteen grocery shopping orders per user, the application alerted users to close to one hundred potential instances of over buying and inventory expiration.