U of L student’s website connects hungry learners with leftover food

By Alexandra Noad - Lethbridge Herald Local Journalism Initiative Reporter on March 20, 2025.

Herald photo by Alexandra Noad Ankit Mukherjee displays his website snackradar.ca on Wednesday at the University of Lethbridge. The fourth-year business student developed the site which connect students with free food.

There are few things that impress starving students quite like free food, and one University of Lethbridge student has made a website to make it easier for them to find freebies on campus.

Ankit Mukherjee, a fourth-year business student, developed the snackradar.ca – a website where students can connect to free food and event organizers can post when and where they are giving out free food.

Mukherjee was inspired to create the app when he noticed events he helped host as a member of the student success centre would have lots of extra food left over, but no way to make it known to other students quickly, resulting in a lot of food waste.

He says he plans on integrating push notifications, so students get notified when there’s food available.

“As soon as the free food is posted, students would get a notification and can instantly go there, so it prevents the wastage as well as students getting free things.”

With the rise in grocery prices, Mukherjee hopes students will be able to use the app to save a little on groceries, especially if they buy lunch on campus.

He adds that he has been fortunate to have a secure job on campus and has not had the need to use the campus food bank, but he knows many other students aren’t as fortunate.

“I have met a lot of people who access the food bank on campus and the university is doing a lot of amazing things to bridge the gap between food insecurity.”

Mukherjee hopes that creating the website will not only prevent food waste, but also to allow organizers to plan for how many students are interested.

“I want to eventually add a feature where students can like the post, so event organizers have a way of understanding how much interest is there (for) that event and can accordingly budget for that amount of food.”

He also had the opportunity to pitch his website idea at the University of Lethbridge Launch Point Pitch Competition, where he placed third and received $1,000 to invest toward website servers and software to launch snackradar. He says his previous experience at a start-up bootcamp, for which he was nominated by the Dhillon School of Business last summer, helped him utilize skills for his most recent one.

“Although I did not win, it gave me a lot of experience as to how to go about a pitch competition and this time I tk all my learning from that boot camp and tried my best and it served me well.”

As a business student, he wasn’t experienced with coding but says he used artificial intelligence (AI) to learn how to make features on the website.

“With the recent advancements in AI, it’s been very easy to learn how to do things.”

He adds that with the advancements in AI, there will be a lot of shifts in the way young professionals do their work, but the human aspect will be needed to oversee AI as it’s not perfect. He says that young professionals should learn how to use AI to streamline their processes and make their life easier.

“I think the biggest opportunity young professionals have right now, is trying to figure out how they can implement AI in existing everyday processes, I think that is going to prove have the most benefit for students.”

While he is a fan of utilizing AI to make students’ and young adults lives easier, Mukherjee understands the value of doing things the old fashioned way, especially when it comes to learning valuable skills at university.

“University is about the process of learning and if you know how to do things, then you can obviously tell AI how to do it better, but using AI to just get tasks done takes away the learning experience and the process behind how things work.”

After finishing his final semester in just a couple of weeks, he hopes to continue to pursue entrepreneurial experiences and encourages students who have an entrepreneurial idea, to not wait until graduating to chase after it.

“If you want to build a startup, or if you have project ideas not waiting until university is done but building it while you are in university is probably one of the best things you can do because you can instantly get a lot of users and there’s a lot of supports from the university community.”