New Way to Rescue Food
Makan Rescue attempts to bring surplus free food close to where you are located, using technology. The Catch Team spoke with one of its co-founders, Tengku Hafidz, on starting the tech-social initiated project and what his hopes are for Makan Rescue
Written by: Nurina Iffah | Photo courtesy of: Tengku Hafidz
When Tengku Hafidz, 27, co-founder of Makan Rescue, started noticing containers of catered food unclaimed around his university campus after events, he felt uneasy. “It’s knowing that there are many others who would happily enjoy the food if they were offered it. It’s more disturbing when the food is systematically being thrown away in bulk, day to day,” said Hafidz.
According to the National Environment Agency (NEA), in 2018 alone, Singapore generated over 770,000 tonnes of food waste. Of these, only 17 percent of it was recycled. The amount of food waste generated has also been increasing, up to 30 percent over the past 10 years.
Makan Rescue, or Food Rescue, is a mobile application with a social cause in mind – preventing food wastage. The mobile application notifies users on the availability of free food or food surpluses located close to them, which they can claim. In the event of such, users can post up a “food rescue mission” on the application to notify others.
Launched in January 2019, the mobile application has garnered more than 1,000 mobile downloads on Android and iOS today. At the moment, the mobile application caters mainly to NUS, SMU and NTU students and staff. The mobile application was started by Hafidz and his team, all of whom are National University of Singapore (NUS) and Singapore Management University (SMU) students.
The idea first came to Hafidz when he joined the SG100 Nation Building Hackathon, organised by SG100 Foundation in 2018, he couldn’t help but use the idea of food waste as a basis for his chosen project.
At the Hackathon, the Makan Rescue team won first prize for the project.
Feeling motivated by the win, the Makan Rescue team then went on to pitch the same idea to NUS’s School of Computing – they received a seed grant to work on the project. This was the moment the team decided they should commit fully to working on Makan Rescue as a social side project.
What makes Makan Rescue great is its use of location tracking technology. With such a function in the application, it simplifies the process of a food rescue mission. When notified, the users can easily locate the location of the surplus food nearby hence allowing them to go the food themselves and rescue it for free if they wish to.
When asked about Makan Rescue’s future, they have nothing but high hopes. Their goal for Makan Rescue is to be the number one food redistribution tech platform in Singapore. In order to achieve it, they would need to work on opening the application up for public use. “Once we officially launch Makan Rescue to the general public, it could steadily pick up steam in terms of getting more people involved in rescuing the many surplus food around them for free- allowing us to achieve our goal,” said Hafidz.
They also intend to allow their users to redistribute and share more types of food via the application. “We want to allow homeowners to give away surplus food from their households and businesses to sell off their surplus food at a highly discounted price,” said Hafidz.
Since its launch, the Makan Rescue team has published more than 270 food rescue missions within their university campuses. The zero-waste communities have been encouraging, pushing for the agenda of reducing waste. Some have opened doors for them to share about Makan Rescue, while others have taken the initiative to share about them.
