Food banking may be fueled by tangible, non-artificial things – like food and relationships. But it turns out that there is also plenty of room for artificial intelligence to play a role in the fundamental act of feeding people. As with any organization, the functions of a food bank include…
Posts published in “Technology”
GUEST POST FROM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant promise for the charitable food system. It is arriving now — in donor segmentation tools, demand forecasting pilots, automated grant drafting, and logistics optimization experiments across food banks of every size. But what does the next three…
When Daily Bread Food Pantry in Danbury, Conn., relocated earlier this year to a new space ten times its original size, President Peter Kent suddenly had a huge need to get the pantry’s 370 volunteers up to speed on a host of new protocols. In addition to expanding its days…
Less than three years ago, Chicago-based Vivery Community had one food bank using its free Find Food mapping technology to help people find pantries. Now 82 food banks in 32 states are using the maps, and 6.5 million searches have occurred on the platform since its start. That strong momentum…
St. John’s Bread & Life in Brooklyn, NY, has long been a leader in giving clients an easy, de-stigmatized way to digitally browse and select pantry goods. The agency was a trend-setter as far back as 2000, when it made desktop computers available so clients could place their grocery orders…
Coming out of Covid, many food banks phased out their drive-through distributions. Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana is taking the opposite approach by leaning into its drive-through. There are good reasons to move away from drive-through distributions, as they generally don’t let clients choose their own food, nor access wrap-around…
Food Helpers, a Pa.-based hunger relief organization, has added an extra dimension to its school snack program through an online character known as LittleMoochi. LittleMoochi is a downloadable app that encourages kids to pay attention to the nutritional content of their food. Through the app, kids “adopt” a LittleMoochi character,…
What if you could tell your donors that your efforts in food rescue removed the same amount of greenhouse gas as emitted annually by 900 cars? Or restored the same amount of carbon as 63,000 tree seedlings grown for a decade? Six food banks in Mexico and Ecuador are in…
The Global FoodBanking Network may have less reach than the Feeding America network. But its members face challenges that have caused some to start to pull even with their U.S. counterparts along certain measures. Data from 54 GFN members, most of which operate in emerging or developing countries, show that…