Close Ad

The Spoon

Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

nonprofit

Plentiful is a Free, SMS-Based Reservation System for Food Pantry Visitors

This time of year most of us, at least in the U.S., are focused on seeing friends and family, giving thanks, and eating as much turkey, pie, and mashed potatoes as humanly possible. But for millions of Americans, getting access to food is a struggle which can entail long wait times at food pantries and an unpredictable selection.

Plentiful, a project within the New York City Food Assistance Collaborative, is working to make the process of visiting a food pantry a little easier for everyone involved. Funded by the Helmsley Charitable Trust, the free software tool lets New Yorkers search local food pantries and make a reservation, so they can get served quickly without excessive time spent in line.

A simple feature, to be sure — but apparently the results have been dramatic. According to Bryan Moran, technical lead for Plentiful, the tool reduces the average wait time from an hour and a half to just a few minutes. Users can also easily look up nearby food pantries and get accurate, up-to-date operating hours, and give feedback on a particular pantry’s selection. On the flip side, pantries can use Plentiful’s service to see upcoming reservations and plan ahead to make sure they have enough food for the day.

Plentiful is available through an Android-based app with maps, but the software works with any phone that can text message. Users just have to text the word “FOOD” to PANTRY, answer a few basic questions, and they’ll be able to book a reservation to visit a food pantry in their area.

Not an English speaker? No problem — Plentiful works in nine languages. If a client begins answering Plentiful’s text questions in, say, Bengali, the software will recognize the change and translate all future communication into that language.

Plentiful also functions as a data collection tool, tracking which zip codes food pantry users are coming from, where they’re going to, and how frequently they visit each pantry. “This is the first time we have unduplicated results across cities about people who are using food pantries,” said Moran, “It’s much better than a paper sign-in sheet,” he added, which is how food pantries have historically tracked their users.

Since its launch with three pantries in 2016, Plentiful has grown to work with 200 locations in the New York City area. Moran told me that, in any given month, they see roughly 40,000 – 50,000 users on the app. As of now, Plentiful is only available in NYC, but their team is working to expand to more locations soon.

Eventually, Moran hopes that Plentiful can help tackle food waste, as well. He told me that they see an opportunity to integrate Plentiful data into the food procurement side of the pantry system, so they can optimize for less food waste. They’re even looking into creating a pathway to help people with excess food share meals.

At the Spoon, we’re always on the lookout for smart, simple solutions to solve big problems in the food system. It’s time to give thanks that Plentiful seems to be doing just that.

CAS Wants You (and Everyone Else) to Know About Cellular Agriculture

Maybe you’ve heard of this thing called ‘cellular agriculture.’ It’s basically the practice of creating animal products from animal cells, instead of entire animals — and it’s the science behind producing meat (and eggs, and dairy, even leather and gelatin) in labs.

Clean (or cultured, or lab-grown) meat has generated a lot of media attention lately, especially as the FDA gears up to hold a public meeting about how they’ll categorize and regulate this new food product. But despite the buzz, plenty of people are still unclear about what exactly clean meat is, and how it’s made.

It’s that confusion that Kristopher Gasteratos, founder and president of the Cellular Agriculture Society (CAS), wants to change. He launched CAS in March of this year with a mission: to accelerate the commercialization of cellular agriculture.

A key part of their work is education. CAS is partnering with the Good Food Institute (GFI), an organization working to promote cultured and plant-based meat, to develop academic courses focused specifically on cellular agriculture and clean meat. At the moment, these type of classes don’t exist — at least not as more than a one-off.

CAS hopes to unveil their first course this fall through an undisclosed university. They also have roughly a dozen student organizations at universities in Mexico, Japan, and the U.S. working to spread the word about cellular agriculture on-campus through events, grassroots efforts, and tabling.

On the business side, CAS also works with cellular ag companies to help further their goals. In addition to the seven partners listed on their site, which includes Finless Foods, Supermeat, and PerfectDay, Gasteratos listed three more clean meat company partners over the phone. Organizations might come to CAS with new Cell Ag ventures they want to get off the ground, funding needs, or requests to bolster existing companies. 

“We work on things that people haven’t necessarily requested, but we think could be really useful,” said Gasteratos. For example, their team is developing a children’s book to introduce kids to cellular ag, and are working with the military. They also aren’t afraid to pursue some… slightly unorthodox projects for the greater good; they’re working with companies that use cellular agriculture technology to make dog meat (no, not pet food — dog meat), wearable furs, and rhino horns. Which sounds pretty off-putting, until you realize that if these products are successfully made animal cells, they’ll be able to reduce the amount of whole animals killed.

Perhaps most interestingly, CAS is also in the midst of creating a digital communal space for cellular ag-lovers to meet and discuss ideas. While it’s not yet built, the CAS Collaborative Center (C^3) will be a “pillar” of their mission, according to Gasteratos. “It will be like a Reddit, Facebook, or Slack, but custom-made for Cell Ag,” he said.

To join, volunteers fill out a form with their areas of interest (religion, media, and social science are just a few examples). After they’re accepted into the space, they’ll be able to communicate with academics, activists, and entrepreneurs in the cellular agriculture field. It’s basically grassroots community organizing for the 21st-century meets Shojinmeat’s cultured meat Slack channel.

CAS isn’t the only nonprofit working to support this growing field. The aforementioned Good Food Institute and New Harvest are two others who fund, advise, and supply resources to new cellular ag companies. Gasteratos said overcrowding wasn’t an issue — in fact, it was an opportunity. “The field is so new, and everything is collaborative,” he told me over the phone.

The nonprofit is funded by individual donors, foundations, and philanthropic contributors from investors. They have 10 executive board members, including GFI’s executive director Bruce Friedrich and Shojinmeat’s Yuki Hanyu, and roughly 20-30 people on the team. They’re currently a VIP Venture at the Harvard Innovation Lab, where Gasteratos was a student.

“Everything has to fall into the mission: help people, animals, and the world,” said Gasteratos. Hopefully, along with collaboration from New Harvest and GFI, they’ll be able to do just that.

Vertical Integration Takes Commonwealth Kitchen’s Incubator to New Heights

Food incubators, coworking spaces for food-related businesses, are nothing new. From Harlem-based Hot Bread Kitchen to the self-proclaimed “food innovation accelerator” Food-X to the (relatively) newly-minted Pilotworks backed by the team behind Blue Hill Stone Barns, the sharing economy has had its foot in the kitchen door for a while—and there are a lot of options for burgeoning food businesses to choose from.

However, in the heart of Boston’s Promise Neighborhood, the nonprofit Commonwealth Kitchen (CWK) is trying to revolutionize the food incubator template by bringing vertical integration into the mix. They still provide a shared kitchen, access to education, and a lower barrier to starting a food company to their 50+ business members, but they don’t stop there. Instead, CWK takes a holistic approach to their incubator business plan, providing their members with resources to overcome the nitty-gritty challenges of food production.

“We saw that our companies needed way more support with things like permits, licenses, food health testing, and insurance,” said Jen Faigel, executive director of CWK, in an interview with the Spoon. And so they hired experienced staff to provide their members with industry-specific support in everything from R&D to FDA registration to listeria testing.“We’re trying to give people a realistic opportunity to build a viable company,” she added. “Our focus is on hardcore scalability.”

To achieve this goal, CWK puts heavy emphasis on efficiency. They invested in a few larger, multi-purpose machines for their kitchen that could produce multiple goods; ones that could, say, make the dough for Quicksilver Baking Co.’s savory rugelach and mix up a batch of fillings for Yang’s Delicious Dumplings. They also aggregated the various part-time workers to form a full-time staff trained in the production of a slew of their members’ products. This somewhat radical step enabled CWK to offer a competitive wage and benefits to its employees, offsetting this cost with increased efficiency in production. This shift also frees up the business owners to spend their time marketing and selling their product.

With this framework in place, they decided to open up their small-batch manufacturing operation for hire, allowing everyone from local farmers and restaurants to outsource their production. “I hadn’t heard of any other incubator doing this kind of manufacturing,” said Faigel. “Probably because it’s unbelievably difficult and complicated to do.” 

But they didn’t stop there. Since their establishment in 2009, CWK has been out to bridge the gaps in the marketplace across all sectors of the food system. So far, this also includes tapping into the ripe institutional markets in Boston, namely universities. “Students often want healthy, transparent, local, authentic foods, and big brands aren’t paying attention to that desire,” said Faigel. But CWK is. Currently, Harvard University stocks salsa fresca from their member business Nola’s Fresh Food, and they produce and package applesauce (made from surplus apples from local farms) for the Boston Children’s Hospital.

In fact, making use of farmers’ surplus has become a key part of CWK’s sales; they’ll take crops that would be thrown in the compost, turn them into a value-added product, then sell them back, either to the farmer or in another market. Surplus tomatoes become tomato sauce peddled at a farm stand, excess pumpkin becomes pumpkin soup for a university dining hall. CWK is looking to shrink their margins wherever possible, and they’re thinking outside the box to make it happen.

This is not to say that CWK has perfected their method, or that their brand of vertical integration is without its challenges. “All of the changeovers are really tricky to manage,” said Faigel. “We have a good theory, but in practice, it’s very hard to execute.” Investing in machines to make multiple foods and putting in place resources and protocols for managing food safety, quality control, and marketing has also been an enormous hurdle. And with 140 employees to coordinate (18 of which work directly for CWK), logistics can quickly become a nightmare. 

For now, though, CWK is expanding—and not just within the realm of edible goods. For example, Suvie, a smart oven which just blew past its Kickstarter goal, is one of its member businesses. “Suvie knew all about the tech side of what they wanted, but needed help early on figuring out permitting on the food side,” said Faigel. “We also assisted with beta testing for packaging, scale issues, and R&D.” She told me that Suvie is the first equipment business that has come their way, but CWK is certainly open to welcoming more kitchen gadget start-ups and food-related tech enterprises in the future.

In fact, Faigel is confident that the CWK model will soon spread. “The integration of services, small-batch manufacturing, lower inventory, and more on-demand production is the way the food industry is going,” she told the Spoon. “We’ve worked hard to figure out a model, which we think is enormously replicable.” That means that this sort of vertically-integrated food incubator model may soon be making its way to your city.