By Yvette Lin, Staff Writer
The sound of chirping birds and the whistling March breeze calm senior Sulekha Kishore as she jogs easily around the block, stopping to stretch beside an orange-laden tree. Her eyes narrow in thought as she carefully studies the plump, unpicked fruits hanging from the stems and the wasted brown oranges lying around her neighbor’s yard.
“I knew people who wanted fresh, home-grown fruits,” Kishore said. “Seeing all the wasted fruits, I thought that there needed to be a way to connect fruit owners to fruit seekers.”
Inspired, Kishore developed FruitFull, an app that allows produce and fruit tree owners to share their products with people in their community. Users can either choose to share their homegrown produce or purchase from available listings nearby. The app provides maps for convenient pick-up locations and a built-in messaging system for customers to directly contact produce owners.
“Seeing the first fruit listing by someone from Temple City was the most exciting,” Kishore said. “It was the tiniest bit of validation that all the effort had paid off and had been useful to someone.”
With some help from her father, Kishore began designing the app’s layout in early April, working in increments throughout May and June to create both a convenient and accessible interface. Utilizing database integration through Zapier and AirTable to create the backend of the app, she focused on smaller units and tasks at a time. This allowed her to efficiently develop a working prototype by the end of May and begin the steps towards the app’s official launch in June.
“There were many weeks where the progress felt really slow, and it was hard to get people to actually list their products on the app,” Kishore said. “Though almost 250 people have signed up for the app, the total number of listings is in the low 20s. I’m currently advertising to more cities in the area through community websites like Nextdoor and local Facebook groups in order to increase signups.”
Released on June 17, FruitFull is free to download on all iOS and Android devices within the U.S. For now, Kishore plans to expand her app for international use and gain a greater number of users and fruit listings, before moving on to additional projects.
“Don’t worry too much about whether it will work perfectly at first,” Kishore said. “Building and launching an app gives you the opportunity to share new ideas with others, and a lot of the learning happens along the way!”