Annapurna is a real-time platform connecting food donors, NGOs and volunteers, built with React and Supabase, designed to reduce food waste by making surplus food visible to the people who need it in the time it's still safe to eat.
It didn't stop at the demo
Most hackathon projects die the moment the judging ends. Annapurna won three separate rounds — because Team TechVerse kept iterating on it between events, not because we resubmitted the same demo. Each win came with real feedback that shaped the next version.
The technical decision that mattered most
Real-time state, not polling. Donors post surplus food, and volunteers and NGOs see it appear live — because food that's fresh at 2pm is a health risk by 6pm, and a platform that refreshes on a 30-second interval isn't actually solving the problem it claims to.
What building for social impact taught me
The technology is the easy part. The hard part is designing a flow simple enough that a volunteer with no technical background will actually use it under time pressure. Every screen we cut made the platform more useful, not less.
Code: github.com/Pranjulrathour/annapurna.live