CMPO-VT-PANTRY-INVENTORY

Inspiration

The VT Food Pantry tracks everything in a physical notebook re-entered manually into Excel. We wanted to fix that.

What We Built

A full-stack inventory system with two views — volunteers can browse and search without logging in, staff get a full dashboard with live stats, vendor tracking, and operational tools.

How We Built It

• Google Antigravity IDE for development
• Google Gemini API for natural language smart search
• Firebase Firestore as our real-time database
• Google Sheets API for one-click inventory export
• Python Flask backend + React frontend

Challenges

Making it genuinely usable for non-technical volunteers while keeping staff tools powerful. We also built Gemini search with an automatic fallback so the app never breaks if the API is slow.

What We Learned

The best solution is the simplest one a non-technical volunteer can actually use — we kept that as our north star throughout the build.

Built With

• firebase-auth
• firebase-firestore
• flask
• flask-cors
• google-antigravity-ide
• google-cloud
• google-gemini-api
• google-sheets-api
• gspread
• python
• react