Dish Database

Problem: Foodwaste in school canteens - partly because of the fact that diners should order the meals some days before and just by the name of the meal they cannot correctly guess if they would appreciate it. From the cooks point of view its sometimes difficult to build menus based on the criteria which should be kept, we are aiming to help cooks make the menu more diverse too. We would like to improve diners-cooks relations and make it easier for diners to be involved.

Solution: We have developed a web application where cooks upload photos of meals from their canteen and these are connected with the names of the meals. Diners can evaluate those meals and by that they give feedback to others and to cooks too. Important part is “Menumaker” program for menu building - it suggests menu for cooks based on criteria which they should pursue. It works with the meals which they have already cooked and suggests adding new meals with good feedback from other school canteens.

Impact: We easily spare a lot of work and nerves to cooks, we improve the satisfaction of diners, make work of cooks more effective and we give to diners possibility to participate and due to it they will start to perceive cooks not as somebody behind a wall but as real, equal people with whom they can communicate. If every highschooler in Czechia just once per each month of schoolyear thanks to us haven’t thrown away his lunch we would save almost 1 000 tons of foodwaste per year.

Feasibility: For several months now, our former high school has been running a beta version of the food evaluation part. To complete the Menumaker part and promote the project, we need funding - we lack about 100 000 CZK. Otherwise we are not limited and can immediately expand the current version to schools and work on the extension. The operating costs will be low, we aim to have a sustainable business model. There is really high potential of succes - nothing similar exists in Czechia, maybe in whole world.

What you built: We have built a functional prototype of Menumaker which now can make Menus based on some criteria (MVP). We also added an educational part of our web application where it is easily shown what the journey of food is - from field to fork and what happens with it if we waste it… We have also implemented AI to suggest new meals so the menu will be more diverse and cooks will have new inspiration. https://github.com/Nashup1

What you had before: We had a functional website for food evaluation running at our former high school and a really simple prototype of Menumaker in Figma.

What comes next: Our next step is developing Menumaker to more advanced form, do some updates in the evaluation part of our solution and spread on schools in Prague. After we get some more user feedback we will implement it and then we want to spread across whole Czechia and save as much food as possible.

Video: https://youtu.be/gwuY2FDLdFM