Our Spring Hackathon season has nearly come to end, and we’re excited about how this element of our iTrade University initiative is turning out! In the last two months, we sponsored and attended four university hackathons and received a total of 28 iTrade-specific hackathon submissions.  At SLO Hacks at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, over 50 students attended our workshop, and we received inspiring submissions for traceability-related technology concepts. iTrade then headed south for UCLA’s LA Hacks, featuring over 1,000 participants, many of whom submitted ideas for how to reduce the negative impact of a recall on the broader perishables supply chain.

Our next hackathon was UCSD’s HackXX, a women-centric event where a wide variety of submissions oriented to our platform left us eager to come back to future hackathons here. Not only were our products a magnet for these students, but they also submitted ideas on how we could increase foot traffic at trade shows.  For our final hackathon of the season, we went to
HackSC.  At USC, we received nine different submissions, many of which featured great ideas for reducing food waste.

We're going to close out this season with one more hackathon, RUHacks at Ryerson University in Toronto, the weekend of May 17. While this school year may be coming to an end, we at iTradeNetwork are looking forward to attending many more hackathons in the fall—we can’t wait to see how the next iteration of students code their ways to improving the perishables supply chain.