CheaprEats

As post-secondary students, we spend on average over $200/month on food while accumulates to approximately $1600/2 semesters. On the side, we pay for books, tuition and any extra fees which may show itself during the 2 semesters. CheaprEats targets the money spent on food and through our heavily discounted late-night food, user delivery, and easy to access menu we are aiming to cut the food cost per month by 50%. Vendors cannot keep up with the increasing demand of a growing student body and thus require a new solution to help them operate more efficiently as they are losing customers to long lines. Students have repeatedly mention that they would buy more food if they didn’t have to miss their next class but with >10-minute wait times it’s impossible to order a meal and make it to class on time.

During February 2018, Prashant Patel and Ralph Maamari went to QHacks 2018 where they initially made a webbased project based on leftover discounted foods between vendors and post-secondary students named LassMeal. LassMeal was only a design with nothing working but with recommendation from the Microsoft Representatives at the hackathon, we rebranded the product into CheaprEats and launched it as an iOS and Android App at the University of Toronto, Scarborough at the end of March 2018 aiming to participate in the Microsoft Imagine Cup. During this time frame, Jun Zheng joined the team alongside our mentor Tony Shi. In March 2018, we participated in the JEC Spring Economic Forum for upcoming startups and won the pitch competition out of 30 teams across North America. By early April 2018, we had users using the app, vendors such as Nasir’s Hot Dog Stand partnered with our hotdog and were on our beta launch with our final launch in May 2018 to all University of Toronto campuses!