A Next.js web application connecting food banks in the Greater Lafayette area with local donors, built to reduce the coordination overhead that keeps surplus food from reaching pantries before it spoils.

Problem

Food banks in Lafayette operate on thin staffing and depend on ad-hoc phone-and-email logistics to match incoming donations with demand. Donors — restaurants, grocery stores, individuals with surplus — often don't know which pantry can accept what, on what timeline, at which hours. The result is wasted food on one side and stocking gaps on the other, for a reason that is fundamentally a software problem.

Role

Team [NEED: size, and which parts I owned — frontend, backend, database schema, deployment?]. Built during Tech4Change 2025.

Approach

Next.js 15 App Router on the frontend with Tailwind for styling, [NEED: backend/database — Supabase? Postgres directly? A Next.js API route layer?] for the donation listings and pantry availability data. Designed the core data model around a two-sided marketplace: donors post what they have, pantries post what they need, and the matching layer surfaces compatible pairs by location, perishability window, and accepted-categories filter.

The decision that mattered most: whether to build real-time messaging between donor and pantry or to stay with asynchronous listing claims. We went with asynchronous — a donor posts, a pantry claims, both parties get a confirmation with pickup details. Real-time chat would have been [NEED: hours you estimated] of additional scope during a hackathon and solved a problem that didn't actually exist; the coordination gap is about discovery, not about conversation. Shipping the discovery layer well was worth more than shipping a chat layer poorly.

Self-hosted the production instance on my HP EliteDesk Ubuntu server behind Nginx, with a Tailscale-exposed admin endpoint for pushing updates without public SSH exposure.

Outcome

Won the Tech4Change Hackathon at Purdue (sponsored by Synopsys), November 2025. [NEED: any post-hackathon adoption — did any actual food banks onboard? Is the site live and serving requests?]