We were inspired by the amazing work that FoodStash does at a large scale — rescuing over 130,000+ pounds of food per month from grocery stores, restaurants, and farms. While their impact is incredible, we wanted to build something that helps everyday people take action locally.
Let’s face it: most of us want to avoid food waste, but we get busy or lazy, and it feels like a hassle to donate one or two extra items. So, what if you could help reduce waste without leaving your block?
Trash Panda is a local food-sharing platform that helps neighbors:
- Share extra ingredients they have
- Generate fun recipes based on available items
And if you don’t find a match and your avocado is on death row? We’ve got you. We use the Gemini API to whip up recipes using what you have, so nothing has to go to waste.
It’s sustainability, made social (and a little silly).
We built our backend in Java using the Spark framework, following an object-oriented design. We used PostgreSQL for our database, and implemented secure password hashing.
The frontend is written in HTML and dynamically interacts with the backend via RESTful APIs. For recipe generation, we integrated the Gemini API, which turns shared items into usable meal ideas.
Frontend integration was tough — most of us had very little experience with frontend development, so getting everything to work smoothly took time and trial-and-error.
We were also complete beginners to working with databases, so designing schemas, writing SQL queries, and connecting everything took serious learning and debugging.
Despite the learning curve, we were able to:
- Build secure login/signup functionality
- Enable food sharing and matching
- Generate real-time recipes based on shared items (or only your own!)
- Create a fun and functional interface for users
One big lesson: don’t overscope.
We had so many features in mind at the start, but we quickly (or not-so-quickly) realized that learning a brand new stack while trying to ship a polished product in a short time meant we had to be smart and focused. Still, the challenge pushed us to grow and problem-solve fast.
We’d love to keep working on this project! Next up:
- Add a chat feature so users can message each other directly
- Let users set up recurring donation pickups
- Improve the UI/UX with filters, images, and accessibility features
We hope Trash Panda can be a small step toward big change, one leftover ingredient at a time. 🐼🥦