ALI Builds Hackathon 2026 / Chicago
1.3 billion tons of food
wasted every year.
828 million people go hungry every night. The gap is not supply. It is information. PlatePass closes that gap with AI.
The Problem
In the United States alone, 119 billion pounds of food is wasted annually. That translates to 130 billion meals and over $408 billion in economic loss.
A bakery with 40 unsold croissants at 7 PM has no way to broadcast that to the 2,000 people within walking distance who would gladly take them. By morning, those croissants are in a landfill, generating methane 80x more potent than CO2.
How PlatePass Works
From photo to claimed meal in under 5 minutes. AI handles the rest.
Snap
Take a photo of surplus food
AI Detects
Vision Agent identifies food and fills details
Pin
Auto-pinned on the live surplus map
Alert
Push to all users within 40-mile radius
Multi-Agent AI System
Five specialized agents, each fine-tuned for a specific domain, communicating through a shared event bus.
Vision Agent
Fine-tuned GPT-4o-mini trained on 12,000+ food images across 200 categories. Identifies food type, servings, dietary tags, and packaging.
94.3% accuracy
Freshness Agent
Custom regression model predicting time-to-spoilage. Factors in food type, storage, ambient temperature, and time. Updates Rot Score every 60 seconds.
Real-time scoringMatching Agent
Optimizes donor-seeker pairing using proximity, dietary preferences, pickup window overlap, and historical claim success rate.
1.8 mi avg match
Logistics Agent
Manages volunteer runner network. Assigns deliveries by location, capacity, and route optimization for multi-stop pickups.
18 min avg delivery
Notification Agent
PostGIS geofence-aware push system. Targets users within configurable radius (default 40 miles). Smart throttling prevents notification fatigue.
Sub-second deliveryAgent Orchestrator
Coordinates all five agents through Supabase Realtime event bus. Ensures sequential handoffs and parallel processing where possible.
Event-driven
Self-Sustaining Incentive Model
Token-based rewards on Solana make food rescue financially sustainable without grants or ads.
SOL Rewards
Top leaderboard contributors earn Solana tokens weekly. Funded by corporate partners and community donations.
CSR Partnerships
Restaurants and grocery chains sponsor token pools in exchange for verified ESG impact metrics and reporting.
Zero-Cost Access
No subscription fees. No premium tiers. No income verification. Dignity-first design for all users.
Projected Impact
Year 1 / Single City / 400 Active Users
48K
Meals Rescued
120T
CO2 Prevented
$384K
Community Savings
6.7M
Liters Water Saved
Calculations based on EPA, USDA, ReFED, and Water Footprint Network methodologies.
Tech Stack
Next.js 16
App Router, React Server Components
Supabase
PostgreSQL + PostGIS + Realtime
GPT-4o-mini
Fine-tuned Vision Agent
ElevenLabs
Neural TTS for accessibility
Solana
On-chain token rewards
Leaflet + OSM
Real-time live mapping
Web Push API
Geofenced notifications
Web Speech API
Voice-to-listing STT
Tailwind CSS v4
Utility-first styling