This weekend Food+Tech Connect, in partnership with Applegate, Google, Chipotle, Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group and Studio Industries, is bringing restaurant, foodservice, tech and design rabble-rousers together to prototype open-source software and hardware solutions to industry-wide challenges at Hack//Dining NYC.

Check out the abbreviated challenge descriptions below or have a gander at the full briefs here. Wanna hack a better future for dining, but haven’t signed up yet? It’s not too late – snag your tickets here.

Google Challenge: Corporate Wellness

How might corporate foodservice use technology to help people make food and behavior choices that allow them to achieve their personal and professional lifestyle goals?

About This Challenge

People who are active and eat high quality, nutritious food tend to be healthier, happier and more productive employees and citizens. Most Americans, however, feel too tired, time constrained or overwhelmed to make the best choices for themselves. But there is hope. As more and more people find themselves eating 1-2 meals per weekday at work, corporate foodservice has a captive audience and a huge opportunity to influence people’s food literacy, habits and overall well-being.

This challenge is focused on how corporate foodservice providers can use technology to help people make more purposeful food and behavior choices, so they can achieve their personal and professional lifestyle goals.

Read the full brief here.

Applegate Challenge: Giving Foodservice Customers a Voice

How might we use technology to empower customers to better communicate their food needs to foodservice establishments?

About This Challenge

Unlike in restaurants, where consumers can vote with their dollars, in institutional foodservice settings, such as schools, entertainment venues and corporate cafeterias, consumers often lack a way to influence what’s on the menu.

On the other side of the table, foodservice operators have varying degrees of understanding of what their customers want. Adding to that, there are so many operational complexities–cost/price sensitivities, sourcing, food prep, etc–of running a foodservice establishment that it can be difficult to fulfill those needs once they’re known. But consumer demand has the power to shift foodservice operators’ purchasing decisions and can make their menus more tailored to their customers preferences.

This challenge is all about finding new, novel ways to capture and communicate consumers’ food needs to foodservice operators. The goal is to make the consumer voice heard in a way that can influence actors across the foodservice supply chain. Not only can this benefit consumers by giving them what they want, it can help foodservice operators sell more food by better understanding what their customers desire and what they are willing to pay for it.

Read the full brief here.

B&B Challenge: Food Safety

How might we use technology to make food safety compliance data easier to navigate and understand for foodservice professionals?

About This Challenge

This challenge is focused on improving the ways in which foodservice operators find the food safety rules that apply to their situation and then have a clear picture of how to comply to those rules.

Operating a foodservice establishment is already a difficult task. While food safety should always be a priority, the significant amount of time and energy required to remain compliant can seriously hamper a business, especially smaller ones.

The food safety compliance process is a complete maze. Regardless of what kind of foodservice operator you are (e.g., food truck, deli, restaurant, retail producer), where you are, and what stage/size of business you are (mom & pop, restaurant chain, HACCP requirements, food plant, etc.) there are a myriad of compliance rules that apply to you.

It’s an extremely arduous process to just get a clear answer on what rules apply to you and what you need to do to comply with them. On top of that, every local government agency has a different approach to making this information available and a lot of unnecessary time/energy is spent digging for this.

As a result of this complexity, foodservice operators frequently might not even be aware that they’re not complying to local food safety rules. These establishments will unfortunately learn those rules only as they incur violations following inspections. This causes undue disruption to the business, fines that range anywhere from $300 to $2,0001, and possible harm to the dining public.

Your goal as a hacker is to first understand how food safety information is disseminated today and how different those approaches may be across municipalities. Then, develop a solution that simplifies the food safety compliance process and ideally improves the overall level of food safety everywhere.

Read the full brief here.

Chipotle Challenge: Sustainable Design & Operations

How might we use technology to help quick service restaurants measure the
environmental sustainability of how their stores are designed, built, and
operated?

About This Challenge

The way in which a quick-service restaurant (QSR) is designed and operated greatly determines the level of environmental sustainability it can achieve. Every design decision and action designers, staff and customers make has an impact on sustainability factors, such as energy use, carbon footprint, food waste and materials use, to name a few.

Large QSR chains present a great opportunity to encourage more environmentally sustainable behaviors at scale. In order for QSRs to abide by more environmentally sustainable restaurant design and operational behaviors, there first must be an understanding of the environmental impact that any given design or operational action has.

You cannot manage what you cannot measure, and this challenge focuses on finding ways to measure and visualize the dimensions of sustainability for the staff, customers and designers of QSRs. Additionally, environmental impact data should be communicated in a way that is timely, actionable and fits within the context of the user’s experience.

Read the full brief here.