Solving Food Waste

How I solved food waste (winning 1st place overall at Northwestern University's largest ever hackathon in the process). Of course, only the latter part of that statement is true—food waste is a global titan of a problem—but the experience of building Farm Connect taught me that with the right AI tools, even a small team can build a bridge between a tragedy and a solution. This began my Freshman year of college when I joined Northwestern's flagship Hackathon on a team that had just met and formed the day of the hackathon. Combined we were a man short than other teams and only had 5 years of programming experience between the three of us. Looking at our very qualified opponents we realized quickly that our best chance would be to tackle and solve an important global issue with our project and focus on technical implementation later. We chose the theme of agriculture (thinking incorrectly that it would be the least competitive) and decided to begin by doing research into major issues that