Bridging the gap between food waste and food insecurity.
Surplus is an iOS marketplace I co-founded that lets restaurants sell end-of-day surplus food at a discount, keeping meals out of dumpsters and putting affordable food in front of students.
The problem
Restaurants throw away enormous quantities of perfectly good food every night, while nearby, often on the same block, students skip meals to make rent. Surplus connected the two sides with a dead-simple trade: businesses recover revenue on food they were about to write off, and customers eat well for a fraction of menu price.
A two-sided product
I designed both halves of the marketplace. The consumer app is built around immediacy: what's available near you, right now, at what discount, with a checkout flow fast enough to use while walking to the restaurant. The business side had the opposite constraint: a restaurant at closing time has no patience for software, so listing surplus had to take seconds, not minutes.
