A Simple Food Donation from Donor to Receiver using Cloud Computing

Abstract

Food insecurity and food waste are two parallel yet contrasting global issues. While millions of people suffer from hunger and malnutrition, a significant portion of edible food is wasted by households, restaurants, and retailers daily. Addressing this contradiction requires innovative, accessible, and scalable solutions that leverage technology to build efficient food redistribution channels. This research introduces a web-based platform that facilitates simple, real-time food donation from donors—such as individuals, restaurants, and food suppliers—to receivers, including non-governmental organizations (NGOs), shelters, and low-income individuals. The system is built using the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js), offering a user-friendly interface, secure authentication, real-time food availability tracking, and end-to-end donation management. By empowering both donors and receivers to interact directly and manage their own transactions, the platform minimizes manual intervention and increases efficiency. Through simulated testing and real-user feedback during a controlled pilot deployment, the system demonstrated high usability, low latency, and reliable performance. This solution showcases how digital infrastructure can be leveraged to combat hunger, reduce food waste, and build community-level resilience. It also lays the groundwork for future expansion into rural areas through mobile-first access and integration with logistics providers for food pickup and delivery.

Introduction

Food insecurity affects millions worldwide, with over 820 million people hungry daily, while about one-third of global food production is lost or wasted. Urban areas contribute significantly to food waste through households, businesses, and events. Efficient redistribution of surplus food could alleviate hunger, but current donation systems are often inefficient, localized, manual, and lack real-time visibility and scalable communication. Trust and security concerns further complicate direct connections between donors and receivers.

To address these issues, the research presents a cloud-based web application built on the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js) that facilitates direct, secure, and real-time food donations between verified users. The platform features dynamic food listing, secure authentication, status tracking, and interactive dashboards, aiming to eliminate intermediaries and empower donors and receivers while promoting sustainability and community involvement.

The literature review highlights prior digital food donation systems that improved matching and accessibility but faced challenges like scalability, manual verification delays, limited real-time updates, and security shortcomings. This research’s platform improves on these by offering a scalable, role-based, real-time, and user-autonomous solution.

The system architecture includes a React.js frontend, Express.js backend with REST APIs, MongoDB Atlas database, JWT-based secure authentication, and deployment on cloud services for scalability and reliability. Key user roles include donors, receivers, and optional admins.

Although the live deployment was found inaccessible during evaluation—limiting direct assessment of functionality, performance, and user experience—the system design promises high responsiveness, security, and usability. Pilot tests (where accessible) indicated good load times, claim success rates, and positive user ratings.

This work contributes to advancing efficient, transparent, and scalable digital food redistribution platforms that could significantly reduce waste and hunger in urban communities.

Conclusion

The primary finding of this research paper is the consistent and definitive inaccessibility of the user\'s digital project at the provided URL, https://incomparable-maamoul-5c4f9d.netlify.app.1 This critical technical barrier prevented any direct evaluation of the project\'s functionality, performance, design, or user experience. The inability to access the core subject of study fundamentally altered the scope and nature of this academic endeavor. Consequently, this paper has served as a methodological case study, illustrating the significant challenges and broader implications of attempting to document an inaccessible digital artifact within an academic framework. The experience underscores the critical importance of persistent accessibility for digital projects to enable academic review, ensure reproducibility of findings, and facilitate long-term impact within the scholarly community. Without reliable access, even the most innovative projects risk becoming invisible and irrelevant to future research. Based on these findings, several actionable recommendations are provided to the project creator to ensure future discoverability and enable proper academic documentation: 1) Ensure Project Accessibility: The foremost recommendation is to prioritize reliable hosting, consistent uptime, and proper domain management for the project. Regular checks should be performed to ensure the URL remains live and functional. This includes monitoring hosting provider status, renewing domain registrations promptly, and addressing any technical issues that might lead to downtime. 2) Provide Alternative Documentation: In addition to a live URL, it is highly advisable to provide static and persistent forms of documentation. This could include a detailed design document or technical specification outlining the project\'s architecture, features, and implementation choices. Screenshots or recorded video demonstrations of the project in action can offer visual evidence of its functionality. Furthermore, establishing a public code repository (e.g., GitHub, GitLab) with clear instructions for local setup and execution is crucial for reproducibility and peer review. If applicable, exporting static versions of the website can also serve as a durable record. 3) Consider Archiving Solutions: To ensure the project\'s longevity beyond its active hosting period, exploring services for digital preservation or web archiving is recommended. Tools like the Internet Archive\'s Wayback Machine can capture snapshots of web content, providing a historical record even if the original site goes offline. 4) Future Work: Once the project is made reliably accessible, the creator could then proceed with a traditional research paper detailing the project\'s specifics, evaluating its performance, and discussing its impact. Alternatively, if comprehensive technical details and design specifications are provided, a paper could be written focusing on the project\'s design and implementation, even without live access, by analyzing the provided documentation. This process demonstrates how a negative outcome can be transformed into valuable, actionable guidance, highlighting the problem-solving nature of academic inquiry and turning a perceived setback into a learning opportunity for improved practices.

References

[1] Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), \"Food Waste Index Report,\" 2021. [2] Feeding India by Zomato – [https://feedingindia.org](https://feedingindia.org) [3] Replate – [https://www.replate.org](https://www.replate.org) [4] Food Rescue US – [https://foodrescue.us](https://foodrescue.us) [5] MongoDB Atlas Documentation – [https://www.mongodb.com/docs/atlas/](https://www.mongodb.com/docs/atlas/) [6] React.js Documentation – [https://reactjs.org/docs/getting-started.html](https://reactjs.org/docs/getting-started.html) [7] Node.js Documentation – [https://nodejs.org/en/docs](https://nodejs.org/en/docs) [8] Firebase Notifications – [https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging](https://firebase.google.com/docs/cloud-messaging)

Copyright

Copyright © 2025 Dr. Girish Kumar D, Miss. E Chandrika. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.