EIT Digital Master School graduates offer solution to prevent food waste

When Waliyah Sahqani helped developed the GRAPE shopping app, she was pursuing her interest in making products that people need and can use. It’s something she learned in the EIT Digital Human Computer Interaction and Design programme, where instruction was provided by Aalto University in Finland and Trento in Italy.

Along with seeking to develop innovations that people will want, Sahqani said she and the rest of the GRAPE team share a desire to come up with innovations that address urgent societal needs.

“Projects that we worked on were all very much focus-driven, addressing social impact or climate impact, or something like that. All of us have that same passion, and we all learned to build a startup in the same ecosystem as well, from studying together. It works well when you all have the same basis.”

GRAPE helps battle hunger and the negative impact on the environment caused by food waste by enabling consumers to make more sustainable decisions. Users put together their shopping list in the app, and they tick off items as they buy them. The app saves the shopper’s purchased items in their digital pantry, remembers how long ago each product was purchased, and can track what they have already used.

The app makes it easy for consumers to know what they have in their pantry and when it will expire, keeping the most perishable items easily visible, so they know not to waste that food – and not to double-buy food they already have. But that’s not the only way the app will help.

“We want to go a couple of steps further and leverage grocery shopping data to provide users with insights and advice on sustainable consumption, and by these means empower them to make sustainable consumption and purchase choices,” according to a written description from GRAPE.

The idea was first born at a “hack-the-app” contest, involving some of Sahqani’s colleagues, who were working on their EIT Digital master’s thesis at the time. The planned shopping necessitated by the COVID lockdown made it clear that we waste food, but the team felt their first proposed solution needed work.

After the hackathon, Sahqani and others joined their effort. They surveyed people they knew about food waste and shopping habits and received 300 responses that helped them shape their platform. Further adjustment and polling followed.

“We had already done some research. We had ideas flowing, and then we saw the EIT Digital Venture Programme application,” Sahqani said. The EIT Digital support and coaching has proven vital to development of the startup, she added.

“The good stuff was being able to get a prototype or minimum viable product that you can test and adjust,” Sahqani explained. “That was an area where the EIT Digital Venture Programme provided insight, in terms of knowing our market and knowing how to build a product that fits that market."