Montgomery Co. teens create online tracker to help parents find baby formula
By SHAYNA ESTULIN
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MONTGOMERY COUNTY, Maryland (WTOP) — Two Montgomery County, Maryland, high school seniors are trying to help local parents who are struggling to find baby formula amid a nationwide shortage.
Adam Lederer, a graduating senior at Clarksburg High School, gained attention from local lawmakers for an online vaccine appointment tracker he and Nicholas Fettig created earlier in the pandemic.
He told WTOP that when Maryland Del. Lesley Lopez reached out to him to develop something similar for the hard-to-find infant formula, he brought in Matthew Nanas, a friend he met in a programming class at Argyle Middle School in Silver Spring.
Their infant formula tracker, wcformula.com, launched this week.
“We have two different types of trackers on the website,” Adam said. “One is the community map or the crowdsourcing map. People from around the DMV take pictures of in-store baby formula stock and they post it on our website so other people can see that there is baby formula in stock at that store. And it’s all listed on this huge map on the website.”
The second tracker automatically checks stock at big-box stores in the area.
“There’s a little input where people can type in their zip code there. It scrapes all the data from Target, Bye Bye Baby, Bed Bath and Beyond and it takes all the stock data from the different baby formula brands and it reports back into one centralized database of all the stock,” said Adam.
Nanas, who just graduated from Wheaton High School, said it’s a way to give back to the community that raised him.
“Our main goal is just to be able to help these parents give their babies their nutritional needs,” said Nanes.
The website is only a few days old, but so far it’s had at least 1,000 visitors. They are hoping people widely share the link and continue to post information on locally available infant formula so more families can be helped.
Nanes will be heading to the University of Maryland in the fall where he’ll be studying computer science. Lederer will be attending Montgomery College.
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