CASE STUDY

Leveraging AWS To Reach Those in Need

Client: Houston Food Bank

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Community partners

County food banks

At a glance

Challenge

Enable a Houston based food bank to scale delivery operations during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to meet those in need where they are located.

Result

Pariveda interns developed a mobile and web application to enable people in need to more easily find access to food banks close to them.

Impact

The new mobile and web application provided users with a map of pantry locations for ease of discovery, Spanish language support, push notifications by geography, general information about the food bank, and user analytics to help the food bank continue to improve.

The Houston Food Bank distributes food and other essentials to those in need through a network of more than 1,600 community partners.

More than 1 million people in southeast Texas are food insecure, lacking reliable access to nutritious food. Through their extensive network of community partners, the Houston Food Bank leads the fight against hunger by providing food assistance across its 18-county coverage area. In an effort to reach even more individuals, Houston Food Bank and Pariveda Solutions partnered to leverage Amazon Web Services (AWS) in order to make meals even more accessible to those in need.

Expanding the reach of an 18-county food bank during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for delivery services across industries has increased and food banks were no exception. The Houston Food Bank needed to scale delivery operations in order to meet this increased need from their clients. They needed to enable digital ordering, be able to fulfill those orders efficiently, and manage a fleet of volunteers to help.

How Pariveda interns used AWS to develop a platform for the Houston Food Bank:

Leveraged AWS technologies to bring the data together under one stack, and created a mobile application that allows for everything to be in one place.
Pantries can now enable delivery, client pickup, or both for their locations — drivers can be volunteers, pantry/food bank staff, or third-party entities. Volunteers can also sign up to help as delivery drivers or to help with order preparation.
Increased automation to allow the application to process all divisions and stores and output validated and formatted data daily to the third-party delivery partner.

The Houston Food Banks clients can now make digital orders, while the Houston Food Bank can now fulfill those orders from their client’s nearest partner pantry and manage a fleet of volunteer drivers to deliver that food in a timely and efficient manner.

The new system provides the Houston Food Bank with comprehensive partner network management, cross-network support and cost distribution, data-driven insights into the needs of the community, and support for network wide delivery and/or pick-up programs.