Leveraging a Connected Network of Unattended Micro-Pantries to Reduce Food Waste and Improve Food Security

Traditional Hunger Relief Organizations (HROs) play a central role in reducing food insecurity. However, they face increasing challenges in equitably distributing rescued food. Vulnerable populations, such as the elderly, physically disabled individuals, and households with children, are often not able to access HROs during limited opening hours. Moreover, HROs often do not rescue food from smaller businesses, such as cafes, restaurants, and households which contribute to 70 percent of food waste in urban areas. Instead, HROs rely mostly on larger supply chains, not directly reducing food waste at a neighborhood level. This project proposes to pilot a decentralized network of connected, unattended food micro-pantries to provide real-time information on existing demand for rescued food to food donors, collect food donations at a micro-scale level across neighborhoods of the Seattle study area, and monitor food safety. Micro-pantries are an emerging community-driven concept of independent, small, unattended, open-access, and community-run food pantries and fridges that are hosted on public-right-of-way or private properties and maintained by community members and local organizations. The disaggregated network of micro-pantries could support HROs as additional, more accessible and resilient food sources available closer to vulnerable communities and support more localized food rescue from households and local businesses.

The research team will prototype a wireless sensor platform installed at selected micro-pantries to collect food donations and pick-up data and provide real-time information to community groups, HROs, and local businesses to optimize the distribution of rescued food. The project is the first empirical study to quantitatively analyze micro-pantries’ role in fighting food insecurity and improving equitable access to healthy eating. The research team will (1) perform a geospatial analysis of the existing network of micro-pantries in Seattle, WA; (2) develop and test a novel low-cost sensing system to detect food donations and pick-ups and measure food conditions; (3) develop a food donation training protocol for households and businesses located in proximity to micro-pantries; (4) estimate empirical demand and supply models to distribute rescued food optimally; (5) perform community outreach to document current food waste and food rescue practices. This research will provide a valuable, first-of-its-kind formal study of micro-pantries as a potential solution to food security that seeks to close gaps in traditional food rescue distribution. The results will provide key data to scale up programs that benefit low-income, food-insecure individuals, establishing a proof of concept for new community-based food distribution methods. The team includes experts from the University of Washington on urban distribution systems, sensor systems, and food safety, as well as a community partner working with local HROs to support food rescue and distribution.

This project is in response to the Civic Innovation Challenge program’s Track B. Bridging the gap between essential resources and services & community needs and is a collaboration between NSF, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Energy.

Leveraging a Connected Network of Unattended Micro-Pantries to Reduce Food Waste and Improve Food Security

This project proposes to pilot a decentralized network of connected, unattended food micro-pantries to provide real-time information on existing demand for rescued food to food donors, collect food donations at a micro-scale level across neighborhoods of the Seattle study area, and monitor food safety. Micro-pantries are an emerging community-driven concept of independent, small, unattended, open-access, and community-run food pantries and fridges that are hosted on public-right-of-way or private properties and maintained by community members and local organizations. The disaggregated network of micro-pantries could support HROs as additional, more accessible and resilient food sources available closer to vulnerable communities and support more localized food rescue from households and local businesses.

This award reflects NSF’s statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation’s intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

Analysis of a Food Bank Home Delivery Program

Food security, defined as access at all times to nutritious food, is a necessary condition for human beings to thrive and have an active and healthy life. In Seattle, about 13 percent of adults experienced food insecurity. Moreover, food security is not equitably distributed across the population. Food insecurity is more common in households with young children, with single parents, with incomes below 185 percent of the poverty threshold, in Black and Hispanic populations, and in principal metropolitan areas. Hunger relief organizations, such as food banks, play a key role in redistributing food to those experiencing food insecurity. However, a share of the food-insecure population could not be reached by this system. In particular, people who are immobile, immunocompromised, and elderly are not able to access the food bank network. The University District Food Bank, serving the northeast neighborhoods of Seattle, started a home delivery program 10 years ago, where volunteers pick up groceries at the food bank and deliver them to households in need, and largely expanded it during the pandemic. While volunteers were initially performing deliveries using cars or vans, the program was expanded through a collaboration with the Cascade Bicycle Club, a non-profit bike advocacy organization.

For this work, the project team proposes a collaboration between young junior scholars at the Urban Freight Lab (UFL) with expertise in the study of last-mile urban distribution systems, the University District Food Bank, and the Cascade Bicycle Club. This grant will enable UFL researchers to perform preliminary research, to better understand the challenges in the last-mile distribution of food from food banks and identify operational improvements to increase the efficiency of the system.

Project Team Members:

Giacomo Dalla Chiara (PI): Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Urban Freight Lab
Travis Fried (Collaborator): Research Assistant, Urban Freight Lab
Maxwell Burton (Collaborator): PRP & Volunteer Community Engagement Project Manager, Cascade Bicycle Club
Joe Gruber (Collaborator): Executive Director, University District Food Bank

Biking for Goods: A Case Study on the Seattle Pedaling Relief Project

1. Introduction
One of the disruptions brought by the COVID-19 pandemic was the reduction of in-store shopping, and the consequent increase in online shopping and home deliveries. However, not everyone had equal access to online shopping and home-delivery services. Customers relying on food banks were forced to shop in-store even during the pandemic. In 2020, the Cascade Bicycle Club started the Pedaling Relief Project (PRP) – a not-for-profit home delivery service run by volunteers using bikes to pick up food at food banks and deliver to food bank customers, among other services.

The Urban Freight Lab collaborates with the Cascade Bicycle Club (CBC) to study and improve PRP operations. For this work, students in Prof. Anne Goodchild’s Transportation Engineering course on Transportation Logistics (CET 587) are undertaking a case study: to analyze the transport and logistics system of the Pedaling Relief Project and provide recommendations for how to improve operations.

2. Background
2.1. Food rescue at a glance
An estimated 94,500 tons of food from Seattle business establishments end up in compost and landfills each year, while many members of our community remain food insecure. The process of food rescuing consists of the gleaning of edible food from business establishments – called donor businesses such as grocery stores, restaurants, and commissary kitchens – that otherwise would enter the waste stream and be re-distributed to local food programs. Hunger relief agencies, also referred to as food banks, are non-profit organizations that collect rescued food, either directly from businesses or through food rescue distributors (such as Food Lifeline or Northeast Harvest) and re-distribute it to the community through meal programs, walk-ins, and pop-up food pantries, student backpack programs, among others.

Read more about the Seattle food rescue system in SCTL’s report (2020) on “Improving Food Rescue in Seattle: What Can Be Learned from a Supply Chain View?”

2.2. Pedaling Relief Project
In 2020 the Cascade Bicycle Club started the Pedaling Relief Project (PRP), a volunteer-based program that collaborates with local food banks to offer three main types of services — (1) grocery delivery, (2) food rescue, (3) little free pantry restocking — coordinating a network of volunteers on bikes.

Grocery delivery (GD) service consists of picking up grocery bags from food banks and performing delivery routes, distributing food to food bank customers that asked for home delivery services.
Food rescue (FR) services support the existing distributors by picking up food at business establishments and carrying rescued food to local food banks.
Little free pantries restocking (LFPR) services consist of picking up food at local food banks and carrying it to neighborhood micro pantries –containers placed on local streets and open to everyone to store food from donors to whoever needs it. Learn more about the Little free pantries project on thelittlefreepantries.org.

Volunteers use their own bikes, with some cargo carry capacity, or can request a bike trailer or cargo bike from the Cascade Bicycle Club.

2.3. Cargo Bikes
Cargo bikes are two/three/four-wheel bikes with some cargo-carrying capacity. They are increasingly used as an alternative mode to trucks and vans to transport goods in urban areas. Cargo bikes are often supported by an electric motor that assists the driver when pedaling. Compared to internal combustion engine vehicles, cargo bikes do not produce tailpipe emissions and they consume less energy than electric vans (Verlinghieri et al., 2021). They also offer several operational advantages: they are more agile in navigating urban road traffic, they can use alternative road infrastructure such as bike lanes and sidewalks to drive and park, they can park closer to their delivery destination, reducing walking distances and parking dwell times (Dalla Chiara et al., 2020).

3. Project instructions

The CBC provided access to anonymous data on the PRP operations for the exclusive use of the 2022 CET 587 course student cohort final projects. Students are asked to individually perform empirical research using the provided data and/or self-collected data on the PRP operations with the following objectives:

Empirically analyze and describe PRP operations.
Provide recommendations on what actions can be taken to improve PRP operations.

Projects will meet the following two requirements:

Use the provided data and/or self-collected and/or publicly sourced data to perform empirical analysis
Provide justified and concrete recommendations on how to improve the PRP.
Complete deliverables 1 and 2 (see below), which consist of 2 presentations, a project proposal, and a final project report.

Project progress timeline and deliverables:

Weeks	Progress & Deliverables
1-2	Become familiar with R language programming; PRP background and data
3	CBC gives a guest lecture about PRP
4-5	Project proposal; 2-minute lightning talk about the project proposal Deliverable 1: 1-page project proposal
6-10	Implement proposed methodology and perform research
11	Each student will give a 15-minute presentation of the main results of the project Deliverable 2: Final report

The following are potential project directions:

Analyze current routes performed by volunteers. How can they be improved? Get the work done more quickly, or with fewer bikes?
Analyze data from little free pantries restocking. Collect additional data on the use of Little Free Pantries by manual observations or by installing sensors in a few of them. Can we model demand and supply for food donations?
Collect and analyze GPS data by signing up and performing some of the PRP routes yourself. What type of infrastructure do cargo bikes need and how does street and curb use behavior differ between cargo bikes and vans? What can the city do to better support this type of activity?
Analyze volunteers’ behaviors data. Is it possible to model the supply of volunteers? Can you simulate different scenarios of volunteer supply?
Develop your own direction with approval.

Students will be provided with a base dataset on PRP operations. Students are encouraged to use other datasets self-collected or from public data sources (e.g. check out the SDOT Open Data Portal), to share ideas in class and among each other, to use as much as possible class time, guest lectures and office hours to ask questions and share ideas.

1: 1-page project proposal and 2-minute lightning talk describing motivation, project objective(s) and research question(s), proposed methodology (data to use/collect, methods to implement), and expected results.

2: Final report and 10-minute presentation describing data used, including sample size and sample statistics, how data collection was performed, empirical analysis performed using data and results from the analysis, and conclusions, key findings, and key recommendations.

Technical Report

Improving Food Rescue in Seattle: What Can Be Learned from a Supply Chain View?

Download PDF (0.68 MB)

Publication Date: 2020

Summary:

Seattle is one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities, presenting both opportunities and challenges for food waste. An estimated 94,500 tons of food from Seattle businesses end up in compost bins or landfills each year—some of it edible food that simply never got sold at restaurants, grocery stores, hospitals, schools or dining facilities. Meantime, members of our community remain food insecure. It makes sense for food to feed people rather than become waste.

This is why Seattle Public Utilities continues to support efforts toward food rescue, where edible food that would otherwise enter the waste stream is gleaned from local businesses and re-distributed to local food programs. SPU has joined other cities, states, and regional coalitions in committing to cutting food waste by 50 percent from 2015 by 2030, leading with prevention and rescue.

Since 2018, SPU has engaged more than 80 stakeholders from 50-plus organizations in a Food Rescue Innovation Initiative—a collaborative effort to better understand food rescue challenges and explore potential solutions. The initiative surfaced transportation and logistics as one of the key challenges.

To that end, SPU asked the University of Washington Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center (SCTL) to conduct foundational research into the logistics of food rescue in Seattle. This research forms part of SPU’s broader work to identify barriers to making food rescue operations in Seattle as effective and efficient as possible—and work toward solutions to overcome those barriers with both the private and public sector. The SCTL research includes interviews with a representative cross-section of food suppliers, food bank agencies, meal program providers and nonprofit partners.

With this document, SPU seeks to inform the myriad businesses that donate food (and by doing so, reduce their waste costs); the wide range of nonprofit hunger relief partners who collect and redistribute donated food to community members in need; local government; and locally based companies with supply chain logistics expertise that could contribute solutions to this complex puzzle.

Authors: Urban Freight Lab

Recommended Citation:
Urban Freight Lab (2020). Improving Food Rescue in Seattle: What Can Be Learned from a Supply Chain View?