Ever had plenty of food leftover but no one to eat, so you end up throwing it all away? Ever wanted a quick bite but not enough money to spend due to your limited student budgets? Yo Yo Fu of Northeastern University has hit both the birds with one stone through his app FeedShare.
FeedShare is an application that Fu developed by himself after taking online classes through Lynda and Udacity. The app helps connect faculty members, students, and staff at Northeastern University who have their Google accounts linked to the University email addresses. The process is simple. People with leftover food put up an entry on the app stating what it is and where it is available, and anyone who is looking to eat it can contact them. While on one hand food wastage is prevented, on the other, money gets saved for people who are already running on a low budget.
The app was released in December 2015. Photos of leftover food are posted for people to see. Frequent users of the application include members from student groups like IDEA, Scout, etc. Fu hopes to extend the reach of the app by collecting more contact information to help it include people who are not able to access it now. The leftovers, typically, get finished in about 10 minutes after posting. Fu estimates that about 1,900 pounds of food have been saved by the app in a matter of just 16 months.
Fu hopes to become a developer in the future. He believes that there are a lot of unknowns that start-ups have to deal with, and the solution is to reach out to the users and find out what they want. Before he ventured upon fine-tuning FeedShare, he sought third-party validation from about 100 initial users.
N Malavika Mohan