There's this Jain Bhojanlaya where I used to eat. They had a paper coupon system: buy a coupon at the counter, then hand it over when your food arrives. Worked fine, but I kept thinking: this could be digital. No more paper, no more queues, smoother for everyone.
So I built AnnaSetu.
The name comes from Anna (food) and Setu (bridge), Sanskrit for "Food Bridge." Because that's exactly what it is: a bridge between the people making the food and the people eating it.
The idea was simple: a Progressive Web App that replaces paper coupons in small Indian canteens. Three faces to it: the customer scans a QR on the wall, sees the menu, and requests a coupon. The owner gets a dashboard to approve requests, manage the menu, track subscriptions, and see daily numbers at a glance. The staff logs in on a shared tablet, scans the customer's QR, and gets an instant green or red light with a beep. No confusion.
I made it multi-tenant, so each canteen gets its own subdomain, its own menu, its own everything. And I added support for English, Hindi, and Tamil because a tool like this only works if everyone can use it in the language they're comfortable with.
Building it was my way of giving back to the places that serve good, honest food. My goal is to onboard as many canteens as possible, at no cost. Because if you're feeding people well, the least I can do is make your life a little easier.