Donato: An AI-Driven Food Donation and Redistribution Platform for Reducing Waste and Hunger

Abstract

Food waste and hunger are still side by side in the world today, and tons of unused food are thrown away, meanwhile, many people do not have access to healthy food reliably. The classic systems of donations still rely on the manual inspection, unstructured communication, and weak logistics that tends to result in delays and spoilage as well as, lack of transparency. In this paper, Donato is an AI-based food donation and redistribution platform that will combine automated freshness prediction, traceability supported by blockchain, and intelligent route optimization. The system uses a trained ResNet50 to classify donated food into freshness categories, keep donation and delivery records on an authorized blockchain to be tracked tamper-proofly and create dynamic delivery plans to increase urgency to minimize spoilage changes. It has been experimentally shown that Donato is better in classification accuracy, trust, because of immutable records, and pickup latency is lower than that of a manual process. These findings indicate the promising opportunities of deep learning, distributed ledger technologies, and optimization of logistics integration to enhance efficiency, safety, and scalability of the redistribution network of food.