A Creighton4Good project

Good food from campus events, redirected to people who want it.

Every week, catered campus events end with trays of untouched food. BlueJay-Bites connects Creighton students, faculty, and staff with that surplus in real time — so it feeds someone instead of a trash can.

🍽️
A campus event ends
Surplus catering, left over
↓ posted in seconds
📍
An organizer posts it
Where it is, what's there
↓ notified nearby
🐦
Students find it
Free food, zero waste
22M lbs
of food wasted on U.S. college campuses every year.
~23%
of undergraduates face food insecurity during their studies.
Real time
surplus posted the moment an event wraps, before it's thrown out.

Figures reflect widely cited U.S. campus food-waste and food-insecurity research. Sources to be finalized for publication.

How it works

Three roles, one loop from surplus to shared.

BlueJay-Bites is built around the people who make sharing surplus food actually happen on campus.

🔎
Users

Find food nearby

Browse active food events across campus on a live feed and map, see what's available and where, and head over before it's gone.

📣
Event organizers

Post the surplus

When an event ends with extra food, organizers post it in seconds — location, food type, and how long it's available — and manage their own listings.

🛡️
Admins

Keep it running

Admins oversee events across campus, manage access and roles, and keep the platform healthy and trustworthy for the whole community.

Inside the app

Built for phones, made for the walk between classes.

A quick look at the experience. Try the full clickable prototype to explore every screen and role.

Open the interactive prototype →
Coming soon 📱 Live food feed Active events, freshest first
Coming soon 🗺️ Campus map Every posting, pinned by building
Coming soon 📝 Post an event Share surplus in a few taps

Why we built it

BlueJay-Bites started with a simple mismatch: campus events throw out good food while students go hungry. We wanted to close that gap with something people would actually reach for.

The app is a project of Creighton4Good, a faculty-guided, student-led open-source lab. It's built in the spirit of Creighton's Jesuit mission — putting technical work in service of the community around it.

Open source, and meant to travel

Food waste and food insecurity aren't unique to one campus. BlueJay-Bites is designed to become a replicable framework other universities can adopt and adapt.

  • Student-built and openly developed on GitHub
  • Configurable for a different campus, not hard-wired to ours
  • Documented so the next team can pick it up
Built with

A modern, cross-platform stack.

One codebase for web, iOS, and Android — with real Creighton sign-in and a service built to scale.

React Native + Expo TypeScript Spring Boot MySQL Microsoft Entra SSO Live feed & campus map Push notifications
The team

Built by students, guided by faculty.

A Creighton4Good project made by student developers with faculty mentorship and a real campus client.

JB

Jerome Bustarga

Student developer — backend & auth
TO

Torin O'Connor

Student developer — backend & auth
EG

Erika Germinario

Student developer — frontend

With faculty guidance from Dr. Kevin Lumbard and the Creighton4Good program, and in partnership with a campus client sponsoring the work.

Less waste. More shared.

BlueJay-Bites is in active development toward a working prototype. Follow along, explore the code, or bring the idea to your own campus.

Explore the project