JCON 2021

The food wastage in India is 70 tonnes per year, and there is mismanagement at several layers. Approximately 20-30% of the wastage happens in the last mile, between wholesale traders, and retail mom-and-pop stores. Is there something we can do about it? This was the problem statement I attempted to solve as a first engineering hire at a startup. Our customers were 12.8 million retail owners that deal in FMCG (Fast-moving consumer goods, such as food grains, tooth paste, etc). The goal was to develop a platform for retail traders (mom and pop shop owners / SMBs) to buy FMCG products from wholesale traders using an Android app. For a section of the population which is not very well versed with smartphones and technology, the user experience had to be designed from the ground up to be multi-lingual, fungible, unstructured, and relevant. In this talk, I cover how we went about iterating the solution from a simple SMS based system to a full fledged app backed by micro-services written in Java. Having a micro-service architecture provided us the agility to experiment and iterate quickly, and we were able to push out changes much faster, and help solve wastage problems even sooner. I will discuss the several problems we faced in this segment with regards to unstructured data, and how our data models had to adapt. We used cloud services extensively, so I will also cover how different pieces came together in a cogent form to build better experience for our customers.