We are performing a series of meetings with Coop Lombardia in order to figure out how to best integrate our platform in their current business processes.
For big companies like Coop adopting innovation is very challenging as modifying existing procedures requires large investments in terms of personnel time and hardware costs. During the meetings we discussed about the benefits of adopting GS1 DataBar standard, such as the introduction of the expiry date in the barcode, however, without a large push to force the change it is unlikely the current standard will be supplanted. Because of this we are currently developing an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) based solution to acquire the expiry date. Coop have suggested us to introduce also a streamlined manual option, which we implemented via a screen in our application that allows the user to select with just one tap an expiry date (1 day, 2 days, 3+days etc..).
During these meeting we’ve also briefly discussed
- The current and future hardware trends within the company which helped us define the hardware for our platform and the programming language
- How the project can help increase donations by helping the users involved (both donators and beneficiaries) in sharing information not only pertaining to food surplus
- How the experimental part of the project can help make a financial case by acquiring actual data on the savings caused by donating food rather than throwing it away.
