Feeding America has made it easier for food banks in its network to take advantage of its MealConnect platform by making it automatically available in every zip code of the country.
Food banks no longer have to sign up to use the service, which connects extra food from restaurants and caterers to food banks that can steer the donations to member agencies and pantries. Since MealConnect started in 2014, any food bank could opt in to its service. Now, Feeding America has changed the approach to opt-out, making the platform more accessible. The shift makes MealConnect the first nationwide food-rescue and donation app.
“We connected all 200 food banks directly to MealConnect, so that we basically blanket the entire country with a food donation,” said Justin Block, Managing Director of Digital Platform Technology at Feeding America.
The new approach also streamlines the process for food donors. Donors can simply post any available donations regardless of whether or not they have an account. Now, not only are food banks getting more donations than before, but they are getting more descriptive information about the food being donated. “It creates an expedient way for food donors to tell food banks what they have on offer,” Block said.
Since 2018, 22 food banks have been using a version of MealConnect that makes it easy for volunteer drivers to get involved in picking up rescued food and transporting it to agencies that can distribute it. That version built upon the original focus of MealConnect, available since 2014, of rescuing excess food from grocery stores and using mostly agency resources to transport it.
In the latest version of MealConnect, volunteer drivers continue to be the integral link between donors and agencies, and food banks continue to be in charge of volunteer outreach. Volunteering shifts are made to be flexible. “Instead of the target audience being seniors because they have more free time,” said Block, “now [MealConnect] really brings into play all different types of populations.”
While the delivery service Shipt is a financial supporter of the newest version of MealConnect, along with General Mills, Google.org, Walmart Foundation and Cargill, it is not involved operationally in delivering food, Block said. MealConnect is available in the app store and continues to be free for all stakeholders.
MealConnect’s goal of tackling the epic amounts of food wasted every year in the United States took on greater urgency with the pandemic. “Collectively at Feeding America, we all sort of dug deep and tried to not only understand what the challenge was, but also think about finding solutions that were potentially in front of us if we just thought a little differently about them,” Block explained. By re-evaluating its operating methods and assumptions, Feeding America was able to revise MealConnect to more easily link food businesses to food banks directly, helping to compensate for the drop in grocery-store donations in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak.
Since 2014, MealConnect has helped rescue more than two billion pounds of food, and this national expansion will allow the network to maximize its potential. The new approach allows MealConnect to “offer a food donation app nationally that can be executed locally,” Block said. “By thinking more as a network, we’ve created the first-ever solution that’s available to every community in the country.” — Odeya Rosenband
Odeya Rosenband is a freelance writer and essayist at Cornell University studying government and creative writing. She is a columnist and staff writer at The Cornell Daily Sun.
CAPTION ABOVE: A MealConnect volunteer picks up food to be delivered. Photo credit: Waiting Room Collective/Oliver Mauldin.
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