Feeding America Responds to Food Shortage Amid Pandemic
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic causing demand to rise at food banks, Feeding America, a hunger-relief and food rescue organization, has expanded its MealConnect platform and partnered with The Coca Cola Co. and Uber Eats to donate meals to those in need.
“Across the Feeding America network of 200 food banks, the majority of food banks report seeing an increase in the number of people served compared to this time last year with an average increase of almost 60%,” says Justin Block, managing director of digital platform technology for Feeding America based in Chicago, Ill. “It is estimated that approximately 4 in 10 individuals being served are new to charitable food assistance as a result of COVID-19.”
Rising demand is a result of lost wages or sudden expenses due to illness that have affected millions in the U.S. Based upon annual unemployment rising to 11.5 percent and annual poverty rising to 16.6 percent, Feeding America estimates that an additional 17 million people could be food insecure in 2020 as a result of this crisis – for a total of 54 million people, or 1 in every 6 people. This is a 46 percent increase over the 37 million people who were food insecure prior to the COVID-19 crisis (in 2018), according to Block.
“Overall, this pandemic has presented a perfect storm of increased demand, declines in donations of food, and disruptions to the charitable food assistance system’s operating model. And due to rising food insecurity rates, we don’t expect this storm to subside any time soon,” he says.
To boost food donations, Feeding America has expanded services within its MealConnect platform.
Developed in 2014 as a solution for the nation’s charitable food system, MealConnect dashboards allow donors to track donations over time to maximize tax benefits and show their impact in the community. Meanwhile, the platform allows food banks to monitor and track donations, detail when food has been rescued and delivered to a partner agency and share donation receipts with the donor.
“But once COVID-19 hit and food banks faced the triple-whammy of increased demand, decreased volunteer participation and lower food donations because of shifting consumer behavior, we challenged ourselves to stretch and expand the services of MealConnect more broadly,” says Block. “We sought input from food banks across the country, made it even easier for donors to post a donation, and modified some backend architecture that allowed the app to be available everywhere our network is – what once was opt-in is now opt-out.”
The MealConnect website is a single page application (SPA) with .NET on the backend and Angular on the frontend. All the back-end code is written in C# and the front-end is written in JavaScript. The MealConnect mobile app is supported by Ionic/Cordova, a cross-platform hybrid mobile application framework.