Ending Food Insecurity

Food waste goes beyond joining the Clean Plate Club. According to Last Mile Food Rescue, up to 40 percent of all food produced ends up in the trash, and with one in five Cincinnatians facing food insecurity, the waste is even greater. Add to this missed opportunity the methane gas released in landfills from discarded groceries, and a societal issue grows into an environmental threat. But Last Mile has been on a mission since late 2020 to close the gap created by food waste.

In fall 2022, the organization partnered with 84.51°, a retail data science and insight company developed by Kroger, to create a new survey. The data would advance the nonprofit’s mission and support its continued growth with critical insights from other nonprofits on the front lines of food insecurity. “Part of what we would call living our purpose here at 84.51° is really about using data for good across our communities,” Andrew Cron, 84.51°’s chief scientist, says.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF 84.51°

The company frequently teams up with nonprofits as part of its skill-based volunteering initiative, offering community-focused organizations the same services as paying customers without charging. The partnership with Last Mile has been uniquely rewarding and successful according to both organizations.

“This is going to sound so cliché, but it’s like a winning collaboration across retail science and community for the betterment of people,” Alvaro Pasquel, lead researcher of consumer research at 84.51°, explains.

To understand the value of the data collected, you need to understand how Last Mile operates. The organization’s volunteers use its private vehicles to connect companies (ranging from restaurants and grocery stores to stadiums and convention centers) with agencies that have use for excess food. Last Mile’s partner agencies include food pantries, soup kitchens, homeless shelters, elder centers, daycares, and schools.

Volunteers use an app to schedule food rescues. They pick up food a business would otherwise throw away, and the business gets to use the donation as a tax write-off. Then volunteers take the food directly to the agency in need.

Julie Shifman, the organization’s cofounder and vice president of development and external relations, learned about food rescues from her sister, who participates in an app-based food rescue program in Atlanta, Georgia. Shifman’s sister explained that she was on her way to pick up perishable food from a local stadium to deliver to a local nonprofit. “It was like a lightbulb moment,” Shifman says. “I went, That makes sense.”

The mass point-to-point food rescue system filled a void for agencies that needed good, fresh food but didn’t have the means to gather it. Cincinnati didn’t have a system like that. Shifman and cofounder Tom Fernandez decided it should and started working toward a local version of the program in the summer 2019. She quit her other nonprofit job in March 2020, expecting to open Last Mile in May of that year. Unfortunately, the global COVID-19 pandemic put the project on hold until November, when the nonprofit performed its first official food rescue. Since then, Last Mile has saved 6.6 million pounds of food. This year alone, it has averaged 250,000 pounds a month, and it should meet its goal of saving 3 million pounds by the end of the year.

Cron initially joined the nonprofit as a volunteer, but he soon found himself on the board, becoming particularly involved with its tech committee due to his own line of work. Last Mile has leveraged technology to reduce food waste since the beginning, but staff knew they could do even more. Although the organization had made spectacular headway in its first few years of operation, good food still went into the trash, and Cincinnati families went hungry.

“We’ve seen a rapid rise of food insecurity in 2023 in Cincinnati because of the combination of food prices [rising] and SNAP benefits [plunging],” Shifman explains. “Understandably, many more have to turn to food pantries.”

The good news is the organization expects to rescue an additional million pounds of food this year, which they are on track to do, but that created new questions when they began estimating how much more food they’d need to distribute. Ultimately, food is only rescued once it’s consumed, and in order to keep that food out of landfills, Last Mile needs to get the right type and volume of rescued food to the right partner agencies. Although the nonprofit sent a survey to its partners in the past, the small team lacked the resources to harvest and analyze the data to its greatest advantage. “The way the 84.51° team helped us is: Where’s it going to go? Is there still a need? Do we have the agencies in our portfolio to handle this additional food?” explains Eileen Budo, Last Mile’s chief executive officer. “[84.51°] could do far more than we could do ourselves.”

The opportunity to collaborate fit 84.51°’s culture of skills-based volunteering perfectly.

“Once Andrew had made the connections with some other folks on our team, I learned about the opportunity to apply some of the skill sets that we get to practice every day in our business model and use it for the betterment of our community,” Pasquel recalls.

The staff knew exactly what they needed from the survey. They needed to better understand not only the agencies they partnered with but the communities who ultimately received the rescued food. “We’re a very young company. We’re working with agencies that have been serving people facing food insecurity for a long time. They’re in touch with the end consumer, where we’re somewhat detached, because we’re pick-up and drop- off. We’re a logistics company,” Budo explains. “It was a way to get out and touch base with the people we’re serving, making sure what they’re getting is meeting their needs, and then help us think about the future in ways perhaps we wouldn’t if we just sat in our offices.”

“We realized this is actually our realm of expertise,” Pasquel says. “We were able to have some design conversations with LMFR and walk them through different options of how we could test some working theories out and get additional insights for them. And over the span of a few weeks, we were able to finalize what that questionnaire looked like and implement it into our own platform, where we run these studies for CPG clients. I think that that was exactly what the LMFR team was looking for.”

Once the survey and data analysis plans were in place, the wait began. Agencies had months to consider the questions and provide meaningful information. Last Mile wanted them to sit with the survey and think it over before sending in their responses, aiming for quality first.

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF LAST MILE FOOD RESCUE

Pasquel and the 84.51° team came to the project expecting to find information useful for its parent corporation as well. 84.51° grew out of Kroger, and the grocery chain already has a strong working relationship with Last Mile.

“It’s not only a way for us to make a positive impact on the community, but it’s also a way for us to have some insights as to how Kroger can be a better player in LMFR’s mission,” Pasquel reasons.

Pasquel didn’t anticipate everything he’d learn through the project, however. Several major insights throughout the process improved his perspective of rescued food and the community driving the program. The first shock came from the volume of responses to the survey. Of all the agencies who received it, roughly 50 percent answered, far more than 84.51° expects to receive from the average survey.

“That was surprising to us, a company that specializes in research,” Pasquel explains. “Last Mile does an excellent job of engaging with their agencies, and those agencies really appreciate and respect the relationship they have with Last Mile.”

The community’s generosity, however, didn’t come as such a shock to Budo. “We thought we’d rescue about 325 thousand pounds the first year, and that first year we rescued about 1.6 million,” she explains. “So, that gave us a really good sense of how much this concept is needed [and] how generous this community is. We asked, and we got food and people to volunteer for us.”

The food itself was another personal surprise to Pasquel, who explained he had a faintly negative vision of rescued food. “I was really expecting there to be, you know, some issues regarding quality,” Pasquel admits. “But by and large agencies’ perceptions of the quality of food that they’re getting through Last Mile is stellar.” Like many members of the public, he assumed the bulk of the rescued food would be expired or unappealing.

“And that’s not the case at all,” he says.

The collected survey data doesn’t just guide today’s rescued food to the place it’s most useful. Information and insights gathered from across Cincinnati partner agencies highlight tangential issues in food waste disposal, most notably the lack of mass compost services. The data also prepares Last Mile for even greater hauls of rescued food in future years.

“I’m excited about how well this went and how fruitful the collaboration was,” Cron says. “We’re already having conversations not just about how we continue this particular project but how we do even more skills-based volunteering. You know, we’re a small piece in this puzzle, but the fact that we’re already coming back and talking about what can we do next gets me really, really excited.”

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF LAST MILE FOOD RESCUE

Cron isn’t the only one eager to continue partnering with Last Mile. The team who volunteered to work on the project have caught his enthusiasm.

“I’m very excited to use this study as a starting point for a what we call a longitudinal type of study,” says Pasquel. “[The study would] track these responses over time and see how Last Mile’s implementations of what they learned from this data, and the insights that they take out from it, how they act on those, how they implement new strategies and tactics to that and then seeing over time the delta, the improvements that we’re seeing on these types of attitudinal perceptions.”

Last Mile’s work depends on the hundreds of volunteers who do so much mission-critical work. “If you’re an individual who wants to make a difference, download our Last Mile Food Rescue app from any app store, and you can get going tomorrow afternoon. There’s a rescue you can do probably in your community,” Budo urges.

The small start-up has already accomplished great things, but doing a good job isn’t enough for the team or the organization’s founder. “We at Last Mile feel we have a line of sight to ending food insecurity,” Shifman insists. “There’s still an estimated 15 to 16 million pounds of perishable, healthy food [being thrown out]. If we could pick all of it up, we could end food insecurity in Cincinnati. It’s an ambitious goal but seems attainable.”