Computer science duo develops app to support local food pantry

A student-professor duo recently partnered with the Windham Community Food Network (WCFN) to develop a computer application that assists with food pantry deliveries in the local community. The app, called “Packing Sheet Generator,” was developed by recent computer science graduate Cameron Senna ’26 and Professor Garrett Dancik.

Packing Sheet Generator is intended as a tool for the WCFN’s “Community Table/Mesa Comunitaria” program, a food pantry service delivering weekly boxes of food to families in need. The pantry operates out of CLiCK Willimantic, a shared commercial kitchen for members of the community.

The Community Table delivers food to Windham families, taking note of each family’s food preferences and placing them in a spreadsheet. Packing Sheet Generator creates lists of food orders for specific families by extracting data from the spreadsheet after it is uploaded, explained Dancik. These sheets are used by food preparers at CLiCK who package orders for delivery.

The Eastern-WCFN collaboration was started by Sydney Clements, geography professor and former coordinator of the Community Table, who connected Dancik and Senna with the Community Table’s current coordinator, Juan Pablo Yepes Tobon.

Yepes Tobon explained: “[Dancik and Senna] created a program that takes the survey data that our recipients have given us — their food preferences, dietary restrictions, whether they have pets or infants — and transforms it into ready-to-print packing sheets that we can set out for our packers! Now it's feasible for the packers to tailor all 78 bags to the recipients' preferences, where that was an impossible task before."