VT's Solution for the Food Pantry

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  Homepage Page

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  Dashboard Page

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  Inventory Page

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  Vendors Page

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  Transfers Page

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  Reports Page

Inspiration

We found out that the VT Food Pantry was still tracking all of their food inventory by writing in a notebook and then retyping everything into Excel. That felt like an easy problem to fix with a simple web app, and it was a cause we actually cared about since the pantry serves students on our own campus.

What it does

We built a web-based inventory system that lets pantry staff log incoming food items with details like name, vendor, weight, category, and pricing, and assign them to either the open-hours pantry or the grocery pickup program. One of the key features is item lookup, so staff can restock an existing item without re-entering all the information from scratch.

How we built it

We used Visual Studio Code to code our web app and we shared files through GitHub to work on it together. The tech stack we will used is React and Tailwind for the frontend portion and Supabase for the backend. The Google technologies we used are the Gemini API and Google Calendar.

Challenges we ran into

We struggled implementing Gemini API as a chat box. It was the most challenging part for us.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of the form submission and updating quality. It works perfectly and we were able to fix the bugs we initially had with it.

What we learned

We learned that simplicity is harder to design than it looks. Every field and button had to feel obvious to someone who had never seen the app before. We also learned a lot from watching real people use the interface taught us more than any amount of guessing on our own could have.

What's next for VT's Solution for the Food Pantry

Looking ahead, we have several important steps to improve the VT Food Pantry inventory system. Our main goal is to connect a reliable backend database so that inventory data can be saved for future use and accessed by multiple staff members at once.

Built With

• css
• gemini
• javascript
• react
• supabase
• tailwind