Food wastage management startup

The company promotes the highest use of wholesome unmarketable food and reduces hunger and waste by using technology, social media, and strategic investment to help bridge the logistics gap and economics hurdles that result in food waste. Food Cowboy uses mobile technology to help food companies (throughout the supply chain) reduce their carbon footprints by routing wholesome unsaleable food to charities and spoiled food to composters, anaerobic digesters, and other sustainable disposers, instead of to landfills. Its cloud-based systems facilitate scheduling, expedite tax paperwork, and offer food safety guidance so food can be routed appropriately without unacceptable risks or efficiency losses. The client leveraged Perfomatix app development capabilities to create the solution for food waste management.

The client needed a complete platform which could solve the following use cases:

Food Cowboy needed a complete platform which could solve the following use cases;

• Single platform to manage charities, food wholesalers and logistics providers charities to sign up for surplus food
• Food wholesalers to notify charities about surplus food availability
• Charities to accept surplus food
• Alert logistics providers to schedule pickup
• Social media integration
• Mobile apps for charities, wholesalers and logistics providers

The customer needed an integrated mobile and web platform:

• Connecting different stakeholders in a single platform
• Clustering the data from the different sources into one platform.
• Handling multiple real-time data submitted by the food distribution centres and requests made by charities.

Food Cowboy needed a complete platform which could solve the following use cases;

• Single platform to manage charities, food wholesalers and logistics providers charities to sign up for surplus food
• Food wholesalers to notify charities about surplus food availability
• Charities to accept surplus food
• Alert logistics providers to schedule pickup
• Social media integration
• Mobile apps for charities, wholesalers and logistics providers

Food Cowboy system consists of a web application and mobile applications for iOS and Android operating systems. The application follows a standard three tier architecture with the following layers.

1. Presentation   Layer

• Mobile App – The Mobile Apps (Android & iOS) device communicates and requests data to Parse cloud and displays data to the end user. Technologies used in Mobile App  are Ionic, AngularJS, Javascript. By using this technology both iOS and Android use the same underlying code. This helps in easier maintenance of the application.
• Web App – The Presentation layer communicates and requests data to the web server and displays  to the end user.Technologies used in the presentation layer are HTML5, CSS3, Angular JS. By using the latest web technologies the user experience is enhanced while limiting the round trip to the DB thereby enhancing the performance.

2. Business Layer

• It mainly processes the request and it determines how the data can be created, displayed, stored and changed. Parse Cloud Code and Parse API are used in the business layer. 

3. Data Access Layer

• It is responsible for the communication between database and business layer. Database used is Parse DB.

Built a complete supply chain solution with the following components:

• Web application for charities, truckers, local donors, territory managers and admin.
• Mobile application for truckers, local donors, and charities

• Web – AngularJS, HTML5, CSS, JS, Bootstrap, JSON
• Mobile – iOS, Android,  IONIC framework
• Backend – Parse Cloud
• Database – Parse DB
• Hosting – Parse and Amazon Web Services