Organize a Food Waste Hackathon
Do you love to bring people together and cannot be inactive when so much food is wasted? Do you believe that we can reduce the amounts of food waste if we use technology to bring together the people that have surplus food and the ones that can use it either for charity or social entrepreneurship? Here you find an actionable toolkit how to organize a Food Waste Hackathon in your community. Find all the information in the Manual How to Organize a Food Waste Hackathon at the bottom of this page as a Download.
Use the power of IT specialists working with social innovators and food waste experts to #reducefoodwaste! Helene Pattermann
What is a Food Waste Hackathon?
In this STREFOWA project we organized 5 Food Waste Hackathon in Austria, Italy, Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic with the goal to raise awareness, include local communities and find IT solutions and use them to support our work in the pilot actions, to #reducefoodwaste in Central Europe. You can find the great App ideas developed at the STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons clicking through each Food Waste Hackathon following this link. One major goal of the Food Waste Hackathons is though to inspire you and provide you with a toolkit to organize a Food Waste Hackathon yourself to use the crowd knowledge and competences of your community to come up with smart app ideas to #reducefoodwaste in your community.
Getting started
Doing it for the right reasons
- Being realistic: Even though you should reach for the stars and who knows what Marc Zuckerbergs you will have join your Food Waste Hackathon, you need to stay realistic, that in one weekend you cannot expect to have teams create a completely functioning app, that can be used immediately.
- Hackathons are a great way to find and connect the already passionate people on food waste in your community
- Participants bring already ideas and a background in food waste to the Hackathon, so be open to include what the participants have to offer.
- Food Waste Hackathons are not start up curators, but anyway might spark something in that direction
How much time does it take?
Depending on your team size and network we recommend to plan 3 months for organizing a Food Waste Hackathon. We recommend to set up a website, facebookevent and a ticketsystem on Eventbrite. In our experience a good team size are 3 people, organizing one all by yourself might get too much, dealing with food, sponsors, participant management, jury, ...
Why you should charge for your Food Waste Hackathon
In our experience it is difficult to plan a event, that includes provided food for the participants, when you don't know how many people will show up. If you have a free registration, many might not show up and then you end up with a lot of money spent for food, that cannot be eaten. In the STREFOWA Hackathons we tried out different registration methods with different success.
That also helps to make people want to come:
- In Vienna, Austria we charged 10 EUR and payed it back after participation.
- In Prague we had the same procedure like in Vienna
- In Miskolc, Hungary the registration was for free via Google Form and everyone showed up
- In Italy pupils registered via teachers, everyone had to show up :-)
- In Poland we had a free registration via Google Form and only half of the participants showed up :-(
That also helps to make people want to come:
- provide a nice location, that is easily reachable
- have nice prizes to win (from sponsors)
- provide participants with enough information about the event
- send reminders (Eventbrite does this automatically, but you can also customize it)
- have interesting speakers, mentors, etc.
- ask influencers (eg. via Facebook) to share your event (foodbloggers, Zero Waste Communities, environmental activists)
Checklists how to start organizing your Food Waste Hackathon
Here you can download the STREFOWA Checklists, that we used to organize the STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons.
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Sponsors are not just good for the money
In our experience sponsors are a great addition to your Food Waste Hackathon. For sure they help pay the bills (location, catering, travel costs for experts, ...), but they also make your event more interesting for the participants, if you receive money and or goodie bags from them for prizes for the participants. And last, but not least, they also are multiplicators, that help spread the word about the Food Waste Hackathons.
Good sponsors for a Food Waste Hackathon:
In return for the sponsoring support you can invite the sponsors as jury members or if they are interested in reducing food waste in their company, maybe also present a food waste challenge for the participants to work on at the Food Waste Hackathon.
Good sponsors for a Food Waste Hackathon:
- supermarkets (can provide you with food and or vouchers for participants)
- farms (can provide you with food to cook or healthy snacks like apples, carrots)
- Telecompanies (can provide technical gadgets)
- Hotels or co-working spaces (can provide location)
- Universities can provide location or help you to reach students as participants
In return for the sponsoring support you can invite the sponsors as jury members or if they are interested in reducing food waste in their company, maybe also present a food waste challenge for the participants to work on at the Food Waste Hackathon.
Applied Challenges make the Food Waste Hackathon so much more interesting
Reaching out to sponsors you can ask them if they are dealing with food waste and would like to gather ideas how to solve or reduce it. For the STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons our challenges came from the pilotactions, that are part of the STREFOWA project. If you are not already in touch with potential challenge givers, I recommend you ask at these organisations:
- your local foodbank
- a NGO dealing with food waste (e.g. foodsharing)
- university, that deals with food waste in your city (waste management, agriculture, gastronomy, ...)
- supermarkets
Success stories
All STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons were great. Really! Participants enjoyed meeting people from the local community that share their passion for food waste. Sponsors, challenge givers could present their work on reducing food waste. Here are some examples for what happened at the STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons:
- Hotel Mercure Wroclaw reached out to us, that they are very active in preventing food waste and want to be part of the Hackathon (they provided us with the location, food and a challenge for the Food Waste Hackathon Poland). It was interesting for everyone to see how much effort a big hotel puts into reducing food waste.
- At the Food Waste Hackathon Hungary SPAR presented a challenge and was part of the jury. The jury member was so impressed in the presentations of the teams, that they are now considering to implement an App in their work to #reducefoodwaste.
- At the Food Waste Hackathon Italy we reached 30 pupils to think about food waste and that they can be part of the solution. The teachers really liked this applied school exercise and promised to more often collaborate with other schools and do projects on food waste reduction. One student is finishing his ideas for his next project work.
- At the Food Waste Hackathon in Prague, the local foodbank and the TESCO said that they will continue to have meetings with the winning team to see how they can include them in the development of a solution to help distribute food better from the supermarket to the foodbank.
- At the Food Waste Hackathon Vienna many interesting ideas were developed and many participants were very motivated to continue working on their projects after the Food Waste Hackathon ended.
Food makes a difference at the Food Waste Hackathon
To provide it a great experience with time to meet other people and just have a good time, food is essential. You don't want people to leave the Hackathon in every break and head out to the next supermarket or fast food chain. Eating together adds to the experience and you don't want to give people the idea to leave the Food Waste Hackathon earlier :-)
As participants are devoting their time - if you can find funding - it is a nice appreciation to offer food for free. And last but not least you are organizing an event to #reducefoodwaste, so ideally you offer surplus food or other interesting solutions that #reducefoodwaste. This a great opportunity to include local initiatives that #reducefoodwaste. To avoid food waste at the event, make binding reservations and bring doggy bags in case there is too much. These were the food solution we offered at the STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons:
As participants are devoting their time - if you can find funding - it is a nice appreciation to offer food for free. And last but not least you are organizing an event to #reducefoodwaste, so ideally you offer surplus food or other interesting solutions that #reducefoodwaste. This a great opportunity to include local initiatives that #reducefoodwaste. To avoid food waste at the event, make binding reservations and bring doggy bags in case there is too much. These were the food solution we offered at the STREFOWA Food Waste Hackathons:
- Jams from Surplus Fruit (Unverschwendet)
- Saved Bread from Brotpiloten
- A great buffet from Hotel Mercure Wroclaw with surplus food and many creations to #reducefoodwaste in general
- Plastic containers as gifts for the participants (which came in handy for leftovers from the buffet)
- Catering from surplus veggies from Iss Mich
- We cooked surplus food ourselves at the Food Waste Hackathons
- Handed over surplus food to catering to ask to cook it for us
Download the Manual "How to organize a Food Waste Hackathon"
Here you can download the entire Manual with all the checklists as a PDF.
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