In what can be called an attempt to avoid food wastage and cook students' favourite dishes, a team of professors from Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering in Bengaluru developed an android app that can help students to place an order for food a day in advance. Prof Guruprasad YK, MS Satyanarayana and hostel warden Sridhar NK were the brains behind developing this food app.
This app is called as SVCE was launched a few months ago and it is available on google play store. It was developed to find a solution to the food wastage that used to happen when 500 students ate in other hotels and restaurants instead of eating in the college canteen. They had stated that the menu was the same every day and they would feel bored to eat the same. Thus, food items like rice, sambar and rasam would end up in dustbins in huge quantity.
Nageswara Gupta, Vice-Principal, SVCE says, "We could not give this food to orphanages also as they would think that its a leftover food. Thus we came up with this idea of developing an app that can have the next day's menu on the app a day in advance. Depending on the orders placed by the students on the previous day, the canteen will cook the food. This way, we will be able to avoid food wastage and also cook the dishes that students want to eat and it will be fresh."
From breakfast to dinner, everything is available on this app. There are three vendors to whom the canteen contract has been handed over and they cook all kinds of food available in the North and South Indian cuisine and fast foods from Chinese cuisine. Meanwhile, the college has received a good response to this food app. "Around 250-300 students place their orders every day on this app. In addition to this, the food wastage has reduced rapidly from 2000 litres to 150 litres every day," says Gupta.