In order to help people dine out safely during the pandemic, Lick-Wilmerding students Elsa Bosemark ’23, Athena Jiang-Qin ’24, Luna Jiang-Qin ’21, Selene Jiang-Qin ’24 and Anuhea Tao ’22 created Safe Bites, an app that determines the COVID-19 safety measures taken by different restaurants.
The app ranks each restaurant based on CDC guidelines: how easy it is to physically distance in the space, what sanitation and additional safety measures — such as cleaning services — are practiced and whether or not the employees wear masks. Users of the app use a slider to rank these measures. Safe Bites also includes a user-generated form where people can write comments to give additional information, such as take-out or curbside pick-up options from each restaurant.
Photo courtesy of Luna Jiang-Qin
The five LWHS students created the app over the summer while working as a team during the MIT App Inventor Hackathon 2020, which occurred over Slack and Zoom. MIT provided a list of topics for teams to choose from, ranging from COVID-19 to social justice and contestants had a week to create and pitch their apps.
The team chose to focus on restaurants and small businesses during the pandemic.
“For me, personally, my dad’s restaurant closed down from COVID and they had to let go a lot of workers,” said Tao. “It was a small business and something that couldn’t be sustained without a continuous flow of customers, so I personally wanted to create something that would aid restaurants like that.”
The team hoped that this app would show the cleanliness and safety of local restaurants in order to encourage more customers to dine at these smaller businesses.
The project required a lot of organization and collaboration over Zoom. Each group member had a list of tasks to complete and put a lot of trust in the other members so that each component of the project would be completed.
Their finished product was an app similar to other food ranking apps like Yelp, where people are able to search for restaurants and give them rankings. The team used an application programming interface (API), which provides basic information about each restaurant like opening hours and locations.
Safe Bites won first place in the Youth Team category at the Hackathon.
“I never saw myself being in that position where we actually won something. We did something that people thought could be helpful for others, and that was really amazing,” Bosemark said.
However, these students don’t feel as though their work is finished.
While they initially planned to publish their app after the hackathon, the team ultimately decided to wait in order to continue improving it. They knew that it would be most relevant during the pandemic, but for the greatest potential to help their community, they needed more people to use it. They decided the best way to get people to use the app was to make it easier to use and more accessible to software platforms.
Currently, they are working on converting the drag-and-drop code from MIT’s hackathon to React Native, which is used to create apps for iOS and Android users. The team is also doing research to keep updated with the new safety measures restaurants are taking as they begin to reopen in-person dining.
“Something I’m super proud of is that we could’ve just done this hackathon, we have the app, it won something, and then it could’ve died down, but we persisted with this idea,” Bosemark said. “We’re still pushing it, we’re still growing our team, we’re still deciding that we either want to put it on the App Store or have another idea for it.”
The team is active in the Girls in Tech Club at LWHS and has doubled in size to include other members of the club.
The team hopes to start piloting their app in the next couple of months. They are working with Brigette Ehman, who works at Yelp and has experience navigating the restaurant industry, to reach out to small businesses who might participate in this pilot program. The team is hoping that they can find a group of people to use the app to rank COVID-19 safety guidelines at these restaurants.
If you want to help test Safe Bites, the team will be looking for people to help test the app over the next few months. Keep an eye out for more information in the eTiger.
You can check out Safe Bites’ website here.
