The problem MakanLoop solves

Singapore has a strong and globally recognized hawker culture, but food waste remains a significant environmental and economic challenge. Hawkers often lack simple, efficient tools to track what food is being wasted, how much is being wasted, and how their waste changes over time. At the same time, customers have limited visibility into a hawker's sustainability efforts and few incentives to actively participate in reducing waste.

Existing food-rescue, ordering, and loyalty platforms address individual parts of the ecosystem, but they do not connect "waste measurement, sustainability verification, customer participation, and rewards" to one continuous system.

MakanLoop aims to solve this gap by using "AI to assist hawkers in tracking food waste, Sui blockchain to create transparent and verifiable sustainability records, and a reward system to encourage customers and hawkers to adopt sustainable behaviours."

This creates a simple loop:

"Eat → Measure → Verify → Reward → Improve → Repeat"

The goal is to turn everyday hawker activities into "measurable sustainability impact" while helping hawkers reduce waste, save resources, build sustainability reputation, and encouraging customers to become active participants.

Challenges we ran into

Building MakanLoop required combining AI, Sui blockchain, and a real-world sustainability workflow, which created several technical challenges. The biggest challenge was designing a system where blockchain adds genuine value without making the user experience complicated. We solved this by using Sui for verifiable sustainability records and rewards, while keeping detailed application data off-chain.

We also faced challenges with AI-based food-waste estimation, since food quantity cannot always be accurately determined from an image alone. We addressed this by making the AI an assistance layer, allowing the hawker to confirm or correct the result before verification.

Another challenge was keeping the experience simple for non-Web3 users. We designed the flow around QR codes and a simple onboarding experience, so users can interact with MakanLoop without needing deep blockchain knowledge.

These challenges helped us build a more practical architecture combining AI for intelligence, Sui for trust, and a simple UX for adoption.