Like many food banks, One Generation Away, a ten-year-old independent food bank in Tennessee, recently partnered with DoorDash to expand its home delivery service. Then it took home delivery one step further by creating a branded program that has the potential to operate nationally.
For clients, using the food bank’s Doorstep Pantry program feels much like ordering from a Fresh Direct-type grocery delivery service – except that the food and delivery are free (and choice is limited). Clients access the service, which began in August 2022, through a Doorstep Pantry-branded website and receive their groceries in a reusable bag with the Doorstep Pantry logo.
“When you see it on your front porch, it looks just like some other home delivery service,” said Scott Lucas, Director of Operations. “We want to bring some dignity to folks that are feeling like they don’t have any because they’re having to ask for something like food.”
Building what amounts to a free grocery-delivery service required extra time and expense on the part of One Generation Away. But the result is an upscale experience that’s easy for clients to use, while requiring little to no back-end administration.
One Generation Away already has the service up and running in two locations, with plans to expand it to four more, enabling it to cover all of middle Tennessee. Making the service available to other organizations in other parts of the country would be a cinch, Lucas said.
“If a church in Los Angeles called me and said, ‘Hey, we want to partner with you on Doorstep Pantry’ – and if they had the food and the funding – we could launch them today,” he said.
Behind the website is a widget the food bank created that streamlines the process of signing up for the service, as well as communicating delivery orders to DoorDash. Clients do not have to give any qualifying information beyond their name, address and phone number (so DoorDash drivers can confirm a delivery has been made).
The system automatically determines if a person’s address is within DoorDash’s ten-mile delivery radius. It also automatically drops the delivery information into an Excel spreadsheet that DoorDash then uses to map out the deliveries. “The widget does all the work for us,” Lucas said. “All we’ve got to do is have the bags ready to go.”
Deliveries occur every Friday (to accommodate the lack of school food over the weekend), and clients have until noon on Thursday to place an order. Three special-needs students from a local high school between the ages of 18 and 22 pack the bags, typically 100 to 200 a week.
The volume keeps growing. In the first few months of the program, Doorstep Pantry delivered nearly 2,700 bags of food (or 40,000 meals), with almost 1,000 of the bags (or 14,000 meals) delivered in January 2023 alone.
Lucas expects that demand for home deliveries will only grow, with the program potentially serving more people than the Saturday mobile food pantries the food bank hosts. One Generation Away, a relatively small food bank with 2021 revenue of $12 million, also distributes food to 83 pantries and agencies throughout Tennessee and North Alabama, and recently opened a warehouse in Florida.
Last year, One Generation Away rescued 1.9 million pounds of food from local grocers, which it uses to fill the bags of its Doorstep Pantry program, helping to keep costs down, Lucas said.
The food bank is hopeful that DoorDash will continue to provide it with discounted delivery services, as well as grant money to offset its costs. (DoorDash, which during the pandemic had offered its delivery services for free, notified its hunger relief partners at the end of 2022 that it no longer would be doing so indefinitely. More on that here.)
At the same time, One Generation Away is also preparing for the eventuality that demand will outstrip the support that DoorDash can provide. It has already recruited volunteers in the community to help out with deliveries, and has held meetings with local townships. “We’re working with local municipalities and saying, ‘Hey, how much are you willing to invest to feed your community?’” Lucas said.
Making Doorstep Pantry so easy to use required work on the backend “that was a lot harder than you would think,” Lucas noted. One Generation Away was able to include the work as part of a larger makeover of its website that was already taking place.
While it is not actively looking to bring other food banks or pantries onto its Doorstep Pantry platform, it wouldn’t take much to do so, Lucas said. “All we would have to do is type in a new drop location and we’re ready to go,” he said. “We’ve got this really cool model that makes it really, really easy for other food pantries that want to do this. The widget and the infrastructure are there.” – Chris Costanzo
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