Twelve MIT undergraduates spent a Saturday in Trenton, New Jersey, solving a problem that affects thousands of people every week: how to know exactly how many meals a soup kitchen will need to serve tomorrow.
The Trenton Area Soup Kitchen (TASK) serves over 12,000 meals weekly to a community where many live below the federal poverty line. But predicting daily demand is harder than it sounds. Weather changes behavior. Holidays shift patterns. And the kitchen wastes food when it prepares too much, or leaves people hungry when it prepares too little.
On November 8, the MIT PKG Center partnered with the MIT Club of Princeton and TASK to run a one-day hackathon. The students worked in mixed teams with local MIT alumni, tackling concrete challenges the kitchen had brought to the table. One team focused on the prediction problem: using TASK's historical meal data plus external signals like weather and holidays to forecast daily demand.
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Start Your News DetoxTheir solution won the day. The winning team proposed a predictive dashboard that would let TASK leadership see patterns they couldn't see before—and act on them. Less waste. Better resource planning. More meals reaching people who need them.
"The hackathon was an opportunity to think about our challenges, and their solutions, in modern and innovative ways," TASK CEO Amy Flynn said. "The last few weeks have shown how quickly the need for food can escalate in a place like Trenton."
For Vivian Dinh, one of the student participants, the day felt like proof that classroom skills could become real impact. "It was a great feeling to put together things that we learned in SIE like ideation strategies, interviewing skills, and prototyping into a product, and then see that TASK truly believed in our ideas," Dinh said.
The winning intervention isn't staying on a laptop. The students will implement it through MIT's Independent Activities Period in January 2026, with mentorship from the Princeton alumni who worked alongside them at the hackathon. This kind of follow-through—from idea to implementation to real-world use—is what separates a good hackathon from one that actually changes how an organization operates.
Lauren Tyger, the PKG Center's assistant dean for social innovation, recruited the participants from a five-day pre-orientation program focused on food insecurity. She sees this hackathon as one piece of a larger ecosystem: students learning to build social enterprises, a 25-year-old incubator supporting the best ideas, and alumni staying connected to problems they care about solving.
