Mealbridge: A Web-Based Social Impact System for Food Recovery and Community Hunger Mitigation

Food waste persists as a structural inefficiency across urban and peri-urban food systems. Restaurants, canteens, events, hostels, and households routinely dispose of surplus edible food, while vulnerable communities experience chronic food insecurity. This paper presents a practical, web-based Food Collect and Redistribute System that coordinates donors, receivers, and volunteer logistics to reduce waste and redirect safe surplus food to people in need. The system combines a standards-driven data model, donor/receiver onboarding, geolocation-aware matching, route-assisted pickups, and tamper-evident record keeping to create trust and speed at low operational cost. We detail the architecture ,workflow, and implementation using HTML/CSS /JavaScript , PHP, MySQL, Google Maps API, and email notifications. A pilot evaluation demonstrates timely pickups, improved transparency, and high user satisfaction. The approach shows how lightweight, maintainable software can operationalize responsible consumption and hunger mitigation at city scale.