ScrAPPS

I spent a large part of my high school working on a venture called ScrAPPS with my friend and co-founder Michael Gerhard, which was a venture focused on tackling the commercial food waste problem. The idea behind ScrAPPS was to connect restaurants and grocery stores with composting facilities via privately contracted haulers.

There is a story behind the idea that inspired ScrAPPS in the first place. While at Whole Foods, we were sorting our trash into the designated receptacles for landfill, recycling, and compost. We were taking an especially long amount of time ensuring that each item was ending up in the right place, but much to our surprise, the janitorial staff came up to us and said “don’t bother, they all end up in the regular trash anyways.” Given the environmentally-friendly business image I had previously felt to be closely associated with Whole Foods, this was a little jarring. If they weren’t doing it, I am not sure who was.

After drafting up a plan for ScrAPPS, we presented it to just about every food waste producing establishment that my mom was willing to drive us to (tough scene for two 15-year-olds). Based on a fair bit of positive feedback and knowing way too much about where a spoiled head of lettuce ends up, we decided to start building out the platform.

The shameless interrogation of restaurant owners slowly turned into partnerships and the expo marker sketches slowly turned into a fairly functional smartphone app. The final process was pretty simple and made a ton of sense on paper.

One of my proudest achievements to date is conducting successful hauls for places like California Pizza Kitchen and Whole Foods.

Reflecting on this experience, I feel like it is so important to note how this is before Michael and I knew anything about funding, market research, or scaling a product. We were just blindly doing what felt right in the moment until we hit larger roadblocks. After a while, businesses expressed that they were simply not willing to pay the extra cost to have a separate hauler come to compost their waste (sending it to a landfill was baked into their rental fee, so they have to pay it anyways). We were never really able to get past this hurdle, and as normal high school life and academics got in the way, ScrAPPS came to an end.

Nevertheless, this is a technical portfolio, so here are the technologies used:

• Swift and Objective-C for iOS app development
• Firebase for backend and database
• APIs: Google Maps (location and mapping), Stripe (payment processing)
• Sketch and Figma for UI designing