Food Engine

Inspiration

Nearly 1 in 5 people living in NYC experienced severe food insecurity. This is because when individuals are in a crisis, traditional apps and directories fail them. This stems from a critical user experience gap: existing tools mandate live GPS location tracking to function, and their slow, cluttered designs make them incredibly hard to navigate. For highly vulnerable populations, this invasive digital tracking and slow performance causes severe paranoia, leading them to abondon the app entirely and remain vulnerable.

That's why I built Food Engine - a solution that replaces fear with instantaneous food resources.

What it does

Food Engine is a fast, privacy-first, and moible optimized web application that connects users in crisis to immediate food resources without comprimising thier safety. Users can simply choose their big city and type a ZIP code. The platform instantly filters nearby food banks relative to the ZIP code.

When a user selects a specific resource from the list, the interface reveals a comprehensive, single view information suite engineered to eliminate any questions. This page displays: Precise Location: Simple, clear addresses. Operating Hours: Shows the timings when a facility is open. Data Sources: Shows the original database. Navigation Triggers: Single tap links for immediate transit or walking directions. Good to Know Tips: Includes directions, pantry timings, website. Direct Contacts: Clickable phone numbers.

How we built it

Food Engine is a web application designed to locate and list free food resources using TanStack Start, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS. This project uses Bun and Vite for high performance development. The app is deployed for free on Vercel. The design and content are heavily inspired by Lovable and I used VS Code as my IDE to easily clone my Github Repo. I also heavily relied on Github for storing the code and connecting seamlessly to Vercel, Lovable, and VS Code.

Challenges we ran into

The biggest hurdle was balancing search efficiency with user privacy. Standard apps rely heavily on continuous GPS tracking. However, distressed individuals are frequently reluctant to grant location permissions due to tracking and privacy concerns.

To solve this without breaking the app's core utility, I engineered a privacy first, fall back system. If a user denies browser location permissions, they can simply type in their ZIP code. The backend algorithm automatcially caluclates the user's distance relative to the geographic centroid of that ZIP code area, sorting the data accurately by proximity without ever needing to know or store the user's exact street address.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a solo team, I architectured, engineered, designed, and deployed the entire platform independetly in a single week, while balancing user empathy.

I engineered a responsive UI optimized for smartphones. The interface features oversized target touch zones to assist individuals under high stress. I embedded direct connections to each high food insecurity city's API and near real time databases for accurate, quick response times. By writing 97.1% TypeScript, every API endpoint, component prop, and database schema matches perfectly to eliminate application crashes costing crucial time. I paired Bun with Vite, dropping our application build, install, and Vercel production deployment down to just 10 seconds. I embedded direct, single tap routing triggers that bridge my web app directly into a device's native navigation app (Apple Maps or Google Maps) for instant walking/transit directions.

What we learned

I learned that technical optimization must bend with human empathy. Designing an application for users experiencing a real life crisis means intentionally eliminating standard features that developers take for granted, such as user profiles and analytics tracker. True accessibilty in a crisis sometimes means doing less.

What's next for Food Engine

To transition this prototype into a community fixture, I aim to partner directly with cities' agencies, starting with a propasal for the NYC Emergency Food Assistance Program (EFAP). My proposal will focus on integrating Food Engine as a low bandwith, frontend layer over their existing data. Because Food Engine operates perfectly for vulnerable communities.

On the technical roadmap, I plan to continue customizing the platform's layout for high-stress individuals, optimizing low-connetivity data caching for offline use and implement multi-language support (Spanish, Mandarin) to break down accessibility barriers entirely.

Built With

• css3
• github
• lovable
• react
• typescript
• vercel
• visual-studio