Nourish AI

Landing Page - Desktop view
Landing Page - Mobile view
Contribute Page
Food locator
Food locator - Multilingual
Food Donor Page
Gemini AI chatbot
Money Donor Page
Call screen capture with Nia (Gemini AI based voice assistant)

Project Story: Nourish AI Inspiration ✨ As students at the University of Maryland, we're grateful for our campus pantry, which helps us and other international students make ends meet. This experience opened our eyes to the vital work of the Capital Area Food Bank and the stark reality that many people in need are unaware of donation services. A significant portion of the population lacks internet access or the technical know-how for a simple Google search. Having benefited so much from our own campus pantry, we were inspired to give back by building a bridge between those who need food and the organizations that can provide it. By leveraging AI, we created a tool that makes finding help as easy as a phone call, empowering both the needy and their neighbors.

What it does 📞 Nourish AI is a voice and web platform designed to connect food-insecure individuals with nearby food banks and pantries. The core of our project is Nia (Nourish Intelligence AI), an AI voice agent that users can call to get personalized assistance. Nia asks for a location (like a ZIP code) and the preferred day of the week, then uses our backend to find suitable food sites. She can also offer to send directions via SMS or even directly connect users with a pantry to confirm hours or availability. On the web side, the platform features an interactive map for easy pantry discovery and a natural language donation tool that allows users to log donations with a simple text input.

How we built it 🔨 We built Nourish AI using a fast and modern tech stack. For the backend, we used Flask to handle API requests. The core intelligence of our voice agent was powered by Gemini 2.5 Flash, integrated via VAPI. VAPI provides the telephony and conversational framework, handling the real-time audio and allowing Gemini to focus on understanding and responding to the user. We used SQLite Cloud as our database, which provided a simple, cloud-based solution for storing our real and functional dataset of food pantries. We also integrated the Google Maps API for geocoding and the interactive pantry finder, and the Stripe API for secure monetary donations. The entire application is hosted on Render.com, making it scalable and accessible to everyone.

Challenges we ran into 🚧 Our main challenges involved the technical complexities of building an end-to-end voice application in a short time. Collecting and structuring a real-world, functional dataset for the DMV area was a significant hurdle. We also faced Git conflicts 🤯 during our collaborative development process. Working with a voice assistant for the first time presented a steep learning curve, requiring us to consider and handle numerous edge cases for a smooth user experience, such as a user asking for a live agent or the hours of a pantry being unavailable.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 🎉 We are incredibly proud to have built our initial vision from scratch. We successfully integrated a complex AI system for a social good cause, creating a seamless and user-friendly experience. The most rewarding accomplishment is having a working voice agent that can effectively help people find food resources. The project's architecture, which includes VAPI and Gemini 2.5 Flash, proved to be robust enough to handle real-time voice conversations with low latency.

What we learned 🧠 We learned a tremendous amount about full-stack development, especially about building a voice-first application. We gained valuable experience with VAPI and Gemini 2.5 Flash, understanding how to leverage their capabilities for conversational AI. The project also taught us the importance of collaboration and version control under pressure, as well as how to manage time effectively to build a complete application from start to finish.

What's next for Nourish AI 🚀 Our future plans for Nourish AI include:

Live Inventory Management: Implementing a feature that allows food pantries to log in and update their real-time inventory, giving donors a clearer picture of what's currently needed.

Expanding the Network: Reaching out to more food banks and pantries to expand our service area and ensure everyone in need has access to our platform.

Global Reach: Scaling the project to become a global space for food donations, helping to reduce hunger worldwide.