Free food, found faster.
A campus app that pings you the moment free food appears nearby — filtered to the dietary tags you actually care about.
01 — The problem
Most of the food was never going to work for you.
Groceries are expensive, smart brains burn through a lot of energy, and every campus throws out trays of catered food at the end of the day. The free-food mailing list is supposed to fix all three problems at once — but only if you actually see the right alert in time.
Seven years of one university's list — roughly 5,000 alerts — gives a sense of the gap. Less than 1% were kosher. About 2% were halal. The signal-to-noise was so bad that most observant students simply muted the list, and missed the food that would have worked for them. The leftovers went to the trash instead of a hungry stomach.
Dietary tags · 5,000 alerts
MIT free-food list, 2018–2025
Source: free-food@mit.edu archive. Tags coded from subject lines and body text.
02 — How it works
Three steps. About a minute.
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Step 01
Sign in with your university email.
One tap. We use it only to confirm you're on campus.
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Step 02
Pick the dietary tags that matter.
Halal, kosher, vegan, gluten-free, nut-free — combine any.
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Step 03
Get pinged, walk over, share with a friend.
A notification only when food matching your tags appears. One tap for directions, one to forward to a friend who's closer.
03 — For your university
Built as a framework, not a one-off.
Free-Food Finder is live at MIT today, but the platform is multi-tenant by design — every university lives on the same shared infrastructure and gets its own dietary tags, building lookups, and member-only feed. Onboarding a new campus is one database row and a mail-forwarding rule. We're actively reaching out to peer universities and would love to hear from yours.
Drop your university email below and we'll be in touch with what we'd need from your campus to get you live.
Free to use. Funded out of pocket. Always non-commercial.
04 — About
Built by one of you, for the next one who's hungry.
This started as a side project from inside the MIT community, after watching observant friends mute the campus food list for the third year running. It's not a startup. It will never sell your data, never serve an ad, never charge you a cent.
See the data behind the project05 — Frequently asked