Better Food Pantry

Inspiration

For SMALL BUILD, HUGE RIPPLE, we wanted to make something that would meaningfully help people. Since many students at CSUN deal with food insecurity, the campus food pantry is a service that meaningfully impacts many people's lives. So, we chose to make a project that would make the pantry both easier to use for students, donors and staff and help to further the food pantry's goal, and get students to fulfill their nutritional needs.

What it is

Better Food Pantry is a multifaceted website that streamlines getting and donating food from the pantry. For the receiver end, It allows you to see what food is currently available in the pantry, tells you if your cart is unbalanced and has an easy button for automatically adding missing food to your cart. For the donator side, it provides and easy interface for donating food and lets the donator know what foods are low. The website is also integrated with a scale and a food weighing system to accurately record and log how much food is donated. Finally it also has a nifty admin panel to directly manage the inventory.

How we built it

Our team split the work into four groups the frontend, the backend, the database and the hardware. We then built each part of the project against mock data to keep the portions running asynchronously and then connected each potion into a single connected whole.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest issue was scheduling. With 6 people we had trouble hitting the ground running. Implementation wise, the hardest parts of creating Better Food Pantry was connecting the software and hardware portions together, keeping the inventory data consistent across the app, and fitting all of our ambitions into a short development window.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We built a working end-to-end system that ties a physical scale to a web app, and we made something that could help our own campus for students looking to improve on their nutrition and health.