Building the Second Servings App

Published in

RiceApps

4 min readMay 5, 2021

RiceApps 2020–2021

“We don’t have a food shortage problem; we have a food distribution problem.” — Barbara Bronstein, Second Servings founder

Second Servings, one of the largest food rescue organizations in Houston, carries a huge responsibility of tackling hunger and food insecurity in the city. The Second Servings Logistics Specialist Max Curry manages, organizes, and communicates with all food donors and recipients to collect and re-distribute food to people in need. Max came to us with a problem: he needed to simplify his current process of communicating with all 92 of Second Serving’s recipient organizations.

Second Servings volunteers and recipients. Source: Second Servings

The organization receives tons of food from donors every day, and it becomes an overwhelming and arduous task for Max to call up to 92 charities and plan when, where, and how to distribute the food. Second Servings needed a consolidated platform to display available food for charities to claim. That’s where RiceApps came in — our team, initially consisting of 2 team leads, 2 product managers, 4 developers, and 1 designer, assembled during the Fall of 2020 to solve Second Servings’ problem.

After meeting with Max and understanding the pain points of his day-to-day logistics, our team dove deep into building out our user research, flows, wireframes, and initial sketches. The key decision of building a mobile app over a web application resulted from talking to 3 different recipient organizations 1-on-1: food bank managers are on their feet all day, and the quickest way to reach Second Servings is one call away. We decided, in order to simplify the process for both sides, that our platform will act as a mobile marketplace to match recipients with food items from Second Serving’s inventory.

Over the course of 8 months, including 25 virtual 3-hour sprint and scrum meetings (and 3 in-person picnics!), our team has built a mobile application platform for Second Servings to upload images of their food inventory and for recipient organizations to claim those food items. This platform removes the burden of Max having to call recipient organizations to find out what food they need, and Max agrees that the app is useful and “very easy to navigate”.

Our tech stack includes React Native with Expo, GraphQL, Node.js, MongoDB, and GCP. We use Cloudinary to store photos and Sendinblue for email communication. One of the struggles we faced during development was deciding where and how to store images. We discussed the tradeoff between using a third-party photo storage service and hosting the image ourselves in our own database, but ultimately decided to use Cloudinary to rely less on bookkeeping where the chunks of the image are stored. Testing on different devices (iOS and Android) was also difficult in terms of coordinating internal testing among the developers and external testing with the client.

User testing with Max from Second Servings and Terri from Heights Interfaith Ministries.

After completing testing among ourselves and with 3 other recipient organizations, we iterated for another 4 weeks to improve our app’s functionality and fix minor bugs. We’re incredibly proud to be launching in May 2021 to Max, Second Servings, and the 92 recipient organizations. Some feedback we’ve received:

“[The app] is very straight forward and definitely seems like it will be an easier process.” — Damon Wells, The Beacon

And we’re not done yet — we have plans next year to add and improve functionality to the app like integrating food donors into the platform, enhancing the frontend design, creating groups and categories for customized notifications, optimizing driver delivery routes, and improving app logging and unit testing. We’re excited to make an impact on the Houston community and to improve the process of food re-distribution in the city!