Mess Maestro

Mess Maestro is an android app developed to reduce food wastage in hostel messes by providing incentives for pre-informing the mess to prepare your meal or not.

Vision

---

All of us must have been in the pre-paid mess system at least once in their life, and we all know how much food is wasted each day due to the attendees skipping meals. The mess is bound to prepare food for everyone, eventually leading to wastage of food.

Our app provides the user to pre-inform the mess not to prepare food three days in advance, and the user is refunded money for that meal, which can be traded for additional mess single-serves such as ice-creams, etc. This enables the mess owner to efficiently manage the amount of food to prepare and reduce the wastage along with keeping a tab on double loaders, while the user also gets a refund for the skipped meal.

Useage

---

• On launch, the app greets us with a simple yet effective UI having a QR Code, which is updated each day for each user. This QR contains an encrypted unique identifier for the user. This QR can then be scanned at the food serving station as a token to have the food. (Making it completely paperless!)
• The user can choose to inform the mess not to prepare his/her food simply by selecting the option of mess switch in the slide-pane.
• The Meal Switch option has the required options to select for a date and turn-off a particular meal you intend to miss. The mess is informed about your decision, and your food is not prepared.
• For each meal turned-off, you get credits in your account, which can be redeemed for extra single-serve food or money by the end of the month.
• The menu for the day can also be viewed from the same options before switching off the meal.
• Apart from this, the user can also give feedbacks about food to the mess, which can be used for quality control and retention.
• The admin can easily check the rating and the percentage of the people actually having food in the mess, hence enabling them to make better decisions regarding the subject.

The concept not only helps prevent food wastage but also allows easy management for the mess. The serving station can now have a QR Scanner, which can be used to scan the identifier of the user and provide him with the food as required.

Implimentation

---

The app would have had no meaningful contribution if the concept was not proven and studied thoroughly; hence we started a campaign to reduce food wastage, which saw massive support from the college.

We implemented this model for a beta-test in our college for 3 weeks with the co-operation of the mess and hostel authorities. It immediately struck, and everyone loved the concept as well as the app. The food wastage showed a decrement from the 5th day of the trial giving the proof of concept required.
This was presented at the 7th Inter IIT Tech Meet held at IIT Bombay, where it was highly appreciated by the judges.

Hard Work Pays Off!

---

With all this said, Just Install and help save food and this planet.

Gallery:

---

The Resources Used:

---

The App is written in Java using the Android Studio IDE. All the creative resources were taken from free vector image websites and were editted using Adobe Photoshop.