College campuses are responsible for around 22 million pounds of food waste every year. On Tufts campus, a group of students is helping to lower that number by making free food one buzz away with their mobile app, Freebites, which launched on Oct. 15, 2024.
Anyone who has the app can post about a free food opportunity on campus, browse through others’ posts, turn on notifications for any time there is a new post and access chats for status updates on available food in real-time.
Co-founder Sarah Jun, a senior, conceptualized the app and brought a team together to help see her vision through.
“I’m a first [generation] student, so I was trying to find ways I could give back to my community. And I realized there’s a lot of food waste on campus,” Jun said. “So, I just got a group of friends [together] who were also looking for a project, and they’re the kind of friends who are kind of down to do anything.”
The other co-founder and technical lead, Clarence Yeh, is a senior who joined the Freebites team in 2023. He was brought on for the development side of the app where he, along with the team he built, was able to code a mobile app, a skillset that goes beyond the teaching of Tufts’ computer science department.
“Tufts is a really good program to teach you those fundamentals. But when it comes to a specific language, you’ve got to learn it yourself,” Yeh said.
Senior Alice Fang joined the team in July 2023, initially as a UI/UX designer. After the app was developed, she shifted gears and became the head of marketing, where she introduced Freebites to the Tufts community through her advertising strategies.
Initially, the team marketed the app through word of mouth to friends and posts on social media. Fang, in collaboration with Jun and another member of the Freebites team, incorporated the app’s mission of free food into their marketing strategy.
“We do these boba giveaways which have been really helpful in introducing the app to Tufts students, especially in the undergrad community,” Fang said.
Since last semester, Fang has been adding people to the marketing team, leading to even more creative marketing ideas. Recently, Freebites wanted to ride the wave of the trending show “Squid Game” by going around popular areas on campus and playing the one-on-one Korean card game Ddakji that was featured in the show with students. If the student they played with won, they would get a free treat; if the Freebites member won, the student would have to download the app.
“We try to create a very college, unserious, friendly and approachable brand image. I think that’s why we try to do a lot of these interesting activities,” Fang said.
To fund these marketing activities and other things such as server costs, Freebites has received various grants for their efforts. They plan to continue applying for grants, enter entrepreneurial competitions such as Tufts New Ventures Competition and potentially become a nonprofit organization in the future.
Freebites is a student-run organization that is completely third-party independent. However, that was not always the case.
“Initially, we were supported by TCU on their food security initiative, which is currently not operating,” Jun said. “I think that really pushed us to keep going because we thought we found someone who believed in what we were making outside of us for the first time.”
Even though Freebites was originally a Tufts Community Union Senate-affiliated organization, there was a possible “miscommunication” between the Senate and the university, as the Tufts Mobile app recently came out with similar features to that of Freebites.
“We started developing our apps not knowing about each other. And then a year in, we were made aware of each other,” Yeh said. “At that point we were like, … ‘We can’t really turn around and not do it.’”
In addition to Freebites and the Tufts Mobile app, there are other options for accessing leftover food on Tufts campus, such as an email list for free food opportunities. Yeh noted that students do not have to choose between Freebites and these other resources.
“As the official stance, we are not meant to be replacing [the email list]. In terms of design … notifications go straight to your phone. The overall user experience is a little bit more streamlined,” Yeh said.
For the advertising side of things, Fang shared a similar sentiment.
“We’re just coexisting with them, and I don’t think our marketing intends to market Freebites in any relationship with the [email] list resource but more so as an app itself,” she said.
Even with these other free food options, Freebites has amassed a large user base and would like to continue growing that base within Tufts and beyond.
“[We have] 1,000 users at Tufts, and Tufts is kind of a small school, so we’re really excited to see how many more students we can help if we start expanding to nearby universities,” Jun said.
Yeh agreed, noting that the Tufts’ version of the Freebites app serves as a kind of trial run before they introduce it to other academic institutions.
“We’re testing out the product and making sure it’s all fine and dandy before we start [at other] schools,” Yeh said.
For expansion, the group plans to start small. Freebites has one member who attends Brown University, opening the door for Brown to potentially be the second university the app is available to.
“We want to use a campus ambassador model, where there’s going to be representatives at each campus [to help us] publicize and market our app to the campus’ people and to gauge their feedback and maybe report back to our current team,” Fang said.
The Freebites team hopes to see an expansion to other universities within the next few semesters. Before then, there are still things they hope to improve, such as making their app available to Android users, as it is now only available on iOS.
“On our end, we have to make sure that it’s secure enough for other students to use, not just Tufts. So, that’s what we’re working on right now,” Jun said.
As Jun, Yeh, Fang and the other senior members graduate, they hope to continue helping Freebites in a more advisory capacity, but they have built a solid team to lead the future endeavors of the app.
“Behind the scenes, a lot of students are putting in so many hours, pulling so many all-nighters, just to make this happen,” Jun said.
