Zarfo: An AI-Driven Ecosystem for Closing the Loop on Urban Food Waste

Zarfo is a full-stack, AI-powered food waste management and route optimization platform that bridges the gap between surplus food in the hospitality sector and individuals in need. The system integrates a Random Forest Classifier (95.8% accuracy) and Regressor (MAE Rs. 8.24) for real-time Sell/Donate classification and dynamic markdown pricing, a Google Cloud Route Optimization API for Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) solutions achieving 24% average distance reduction vs. greedy baselines, and a Socket.io real-time layer delivering sub-100ms event propagation across four role-based portals (Hotel, User, Worker, Robin). Built on Node.js + Express.js (MVC), MongoDB, React + Tailwind CSS, and Python FastAPI, the platform processes orders non-blockingly via setImmediate(), ensuring instant user responses while background route computation completes within 0.8–5.2 seconds. Load testing at 10 req/s for 60 seconds yields 100% success rate with P99 latency of 298ms. The system aligns with UN SDG 2 (Zero Hunger), SDG 11 (Sustainable Cities), and SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption).