Food Kitchen Sync

Every day, millions of pounds of unsold food from restaurants and businesses across the country go to waste, while at the same time millions of people don't have enough to eat. The vision for food kitchen sync is to create a platform where these meals can be donated to people in need, and nonprofits and other ngos can play a role in preparing and distributing this food.

The biggest challenge with this noble ambition is purely a logistics one: how to organize information about all the available food in real time, and channel it directly to nonprofits and NGOs supporting people in need? The complexities of scheduling chefs and volunteers to ensure this food is utilized appropriately are massive, and Food Kitchen Sync needed help converting this from an overwhelming manual process.

With experience in website development for nonprofits, Wolfco began ideating a web-based donation platform that would facilitate the connections between available food, chefs, and organizations to feed the hungry, all while introducing features to help control for the logistical realities of storing and preserving the food while these handoffs were underway. Together with Food Kitchen Sync, the team began prototyping a web portal and sophisticated system of automation to make this vision a reality.

Simple processes of submitting information and photos about available food, and approving those submissions to make the donation eligible to be released to partner organizations, have been simplified and streamlined with the technology platform that Wolfco introduced. Because food donors are anonymous, restaurants and other businesses can feel better knowing that their leftover food is being put to good use.

The team is piloting the platform with a few organizations around Chicago, and iterating the user experience and underlying business logic based on user feedback. On the roadmap are new features like a notifications service, since available extra product and its status as it moves through the processes is all time-sensitive information, and a full-fledged real-time messaging platform to facilitate quicker and easier communications between the parties involved.
 

Ultimately, the platform that Wolfco is developing will enable Food Kitchen Sync to scale this project to markets beyond Chicago, and become a productized platform that other nonprofits and NGOs can use to better leverage available food in their communities.