Using New Technology to Connect Hungry Neighbors with Extra Meals

May02

Restaurants, hotels and other food service locations can end up with large quantities of extra food on a regular basis. If you’re like me, you’ve seen excess food at a conference or wedding and wondered, “How can I get this leftover food to someone in my community who is in need?”

At the Central Texas Food Bank, we receive calls and emails like this every day, from generous people with surplus meals they want to get to our hungry neighbors.

Luckily, there’s now an app for that! It’s called MealConnect, and the Central Texas Food Bank is using it to revolutionize local food rescue within our network of Partner Agencies.

MealConnect was developed, tested and scaled over the last few years by Feeding America, the national network of food banks that the Central Texas Food Bank is a part of. An initial grant of $1.5 million from Google’s philanthropic division, Google.org, allowed Feeding America to develop MealConnect, and a later gift of $1 million from General Mills powered the rollout and scaling of the program at food banks across the country. The Central Texas Food Bank is an early adopter of MealConnect and has recently been helping to beta test new improvements in real time service.

Here’s how MealConnect works, via Mashable:

MealConnect lets stores and other donors — whether it's a Starbucks, local butcher, grocery store, or farmers market — post when they have food that would otherwise go to waste. Then, the platform's algorithms figure out the best local food pantry or program to pick up the extra food and distribute it quickly to those in need. 

The platform is a web-based app, which means employees at food businesses of any size can use it on a desktop, laptop, or smartphone with any web browser. 

Initial research suggested there were about 27,000 potential food donors in our 21-county service territory who could use MealConnect’s algorithms to get food directly to the best nearby Food Bank Partner Agency, for example, a local food pantry or soup kitchen.

This is a big deal – a new technology that could have a big impact on our mission to nourish the one in six Central Texans without access to enough healthy food.

While the new, larger facility we moved into in 2016 has made our distribution pipeline bigger and allowed us to give out much more food, that’s not the only way to fight hunger. It’s equally important for food banks to innovate, taking creative approaches that accelerate our impact in our communities.

That’s where tools like MealConnect come in. Essentially, MealConnect makes food rescue an open-source process, allowing food donors to collaborate with – not depend on – the Food Bank to get resources to people in need. Especially groundbreaking, the platform makes food rescue accessible to smaller food donors and places that only sporadically have excess food to donate.

From Mashable:

[T]he platform isn't just helpful for big chains like Starbucks. In fact, it's specifically designed for places that don't regularly have excess food. MealConnect's real time model was developed for sporadic food donations, so businesses can donate food whenever necessary. 

And in the New York Times:

Diana Aviv, Feeding America’s chief executive, said that Meal Connect makes it possible to rescue prepared food and smaller quantities of food — and to do so quickly. “This allows us to provide real hot meals — virtually at the same time that someone coming off the street and paying for it would get it,” she said.

The next function to be added to MealConnect will allow shipping companies and produce distributors to route rejected loads or close-dated product to the nearest Feeding America Food Bank or Partner Agency with a loading dock. A downloadable mobile app, as opposed to a web-based platform, is currently in development as well.

Watch the video below to learn more about how food banks are rolling out MealConnect across the country.