As conversations around artificial intelligence increasingly focus on its commercial applications, a team of young technologists in India is exploring how data and emerging technologies can be applied to a more fundamental challenge: connecting surplus food with people who need it.
At the centre of the initiative is Nikita Gajbhiye, Co-Founder of ZeroHungerAI, who, alongside Karan Kumar Singh and Abhileen Pandey, is working to develop a technology-driven food redistribution platform designed to reduce food waste and improve access to available meals.
Founded in 2023, ZeroHungerAI has grown into a team of six to seven members working across technology, operations and community outreach. The platform has contributed to the distribution of more than 2,000 meals in Delhi and is now exploring how data-driven systems can make food redistribution more efficient and scalable.
As part of its efforts to strengthen its presence on the ground, ZeroHungerAI has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Delhi-based Hamari Pahchan NGO. The collaboration brings together Hamari Pahchan’s community outreach experience and ZeroHungerAI’s technology-driven food redistribution platform, with the aim of connecting surplus food with communities in need more efficiently and at greater scale. The partnership represents an important step toward translating the platform’s technological capabilities into broader, community-level impact.
For Nikita, the challenge extends beyond simply connecting donors and recipients. Food redistribution involves several interconnected variables, including location, availability, time, demand and the limited period during which prepared food remains suitable for consumption.
ZeroHungerAI was developed to address some of these challenges through a location-aware digital platform.
Food donors can list surplus meals by providing information such as food type, quantity, preparation time and location. Available listings can then be discovered by users within a 10-kilometre radius, helping reduce travel distance and enabling faster collection.
The platform also addresses the time-sensitive nature of food redistribution. Listings automatically expire after 24 hours, while a three-level classification system Fresh, Good and Acceptable provides users with additional information about food availability and freshness.
However, the team sees the current platform as only the foundation of a larger data-driven system.
As ZeroHungerAI expands, Nikita is particularly interested in exploring how data science and machine learning can improve decisions across the food redistribution process. Historical data on food availability, location, demand patterns, collection times and unsuccessful pickups could eventually be used to identify areas of high food demand and predict where surplus food is most likely to become available.
Future development plans include demand forecasting, surplus food prediction, geospatial hotspot detection, intelligent recommendation systems and image-based food quality assessment.
Such capabilities could help answer practical questions that conventional food donation systems often struggle with: Where is food demand likely to increase? Which available meal should be prioritised for a particular recipient? What factors influence whether listed food is successfully collected? And how can limited food resources be distributed more efficiently?
These questions have gradually transformed ZeroHungerAI from a social initiative into an opportunity to explore the intersection of data science, artificial intelligence and real-world decision-making.
Building the platform has also required collaboration beyond technology. Nikita works alongside fellow co-founders Karan Kumar Singh and Abhileen Pandey and a wider team involved in developing and growing the initiative.
With more than 2,000 meals already served, an institutional partnership supporting its community outreach, and plans for expansion beyond Delhi into the National Capital Region and eventually other Indian cities, ZeroHungerAI is working toward developing a more scalable model for technology-enabled food redistribution.
The initiative also aligns with broader sustainability challenges surrounding hunger, responsible consumption and food waste. Rather than approaching these issues solely through advocacy, the ZeroHungerAI team is attempting to build technological infrastructure capable of generating measurable outcomes and, over time, useful data.
For Nikita , this is where the project’s long-term potential lies.
As the platform grows, the increasing volume of data could provide opportunities to better understand patterns of food surplus, accessibility and demand across urban communities. Turning those patterns into actionable insights could help ZeroHungerAI evolve from a food discovery platform into an intelligent decision-support system for food redistribution.
The journey is still developing, but ZeroHungerAI demonstrates how a real-world social problem can become a testing ground for data-driven innovation.
Through her work with the platform, Nikita Gajbhiye is exploring a question increasingly relevant to the future of technology: how can data and artificial intelligence move beyond prediction and automation to help solve problems that directly affect communities?
