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Turning surplus food into square meals: The tech behind feeding London's hungry

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Turning surplus food into square meals: The tech behind feeding London's hungry

Distributing unwanted fruit and veg to 350 charities is no easy task, explains City Harvest CEO David Carter

The day starts very early for City Harvest drivers, because that's when fruit and veg traders decide whether a pallet of carrots or cabbages will be saleable. If not, the drivers are ready to take it off their hands.

City Harvest is a London-based charity that picks up unwanted food from wholesale distribution centres like New Spitalfields Market in Stratford, and delivers it to other charities, ranging from food banks to homeless shelters to after school clubs all across the capital, who use it to prepare meals.

Seven years ago, the organisation possessed a single van and collected food from a single source - a wholefood shop in Kensington. Now it has 17 vans and collects from London's large distribution hubs, transferring produce to its 130,000 square-foot warehousing facilities in Acton, from where it is delivered to charities who turn it into nutritious meals for hungry people, or transferring it.

Sometimes the food is mislabelled, sometimes it's misshapen, sometimes it's close to its use-by date. Whatever the reason for its rejection, the vast majority can be rescued from disposal and turned into nutritious meals, but first it must be got from A to B.

With 350 charities to serve, and with both ends of the supply chain characterised by unpredictability, this is a more complex task than it might appear. The recipient charities have very different food needs which also vary from day to day, as does the produce on offer, making it hard to plan ahead. Food needs to be collected, warehoused or refrigerated and delivered in a logical order, so flexibility is essential. City Harvest needs to be able to turn on a sixpence, said CEO David Carter.

"We're all about being snappy, agile, responsive, because this food literally has the clock ticking - a retailer or a distributor wouldn't be giving it to us if they felt they could sell it. It's got to go really quite quickly."

Fast food

Optimising supply chains is an issue faced by every delivery service, including the likes of Amazon, but City Harvest felt its logistics needs were unique, given its size, sector and expansion plans. Certainly, pen and paper and spreadsheets had reached their limits. Shortly before the pandemic, it rolled out a bespoke system designed in partnership with Tibco, whose product designers arose at the crack of dawn to work alongside the delivery people in order to gain first-hand experience of the issues they faced.

The result, thankfully in place before Covid hit, was a platform that feeds all parties with real-time information, with drivers able to monitor the routes and supplies from a graphical smartphone app. If something changes, the drivers can be made aware immediately and, if necessary, adjust their stops, drop-offs and warehouse visits. They can also send messages to all parties via the same system.

The system is underpinned by Tibco's Cloud Integration platform with the Mashery API management system tasked with handling data flows and getting the information to where it's needed. The app was developed in two weeks on Tibco's Automate lo-code platform and the system was up and running shortly after that - although the backend continues to evolve, adding new features such as a fundraising solution and with future plans for a CRM. The system made an immediate difference, said Carter, allowing the charity to increase its capacity and for drivers to optimise their routes on the fly.

"We get a notification to say 'there's two tonnes of vegetables which a distribution centre has just discovered tucked away in the back of a fridge, do you want them?' The answer is always yes. But the cleverness happens when mid-route that food is picked up and collected making use of the now empty capacity from the previous drops."

Emissions avoided

It also enabled City Harvest to handle the Covid-induced disruption as restaurants were forced to close, Christmas was cancelled, and new food sources suddenly became available, while at the same time hunger rose across London.

Another benefit has been to allow the charity to monitor its progress, both in delivering ingredients for meals, and also tracking emissions avoided by rescuing unwanted fruit and vegetables, Carter explained.

"The food has been produced, requiring water and of course carbon and its purpose was to feed people so if it goes to landfill or anaerobic digestion or to feed animals then essentially it's wasted, and we've saved over 40,000 tonnes of CO2."

City Harvest's plans include opening new warehousing facilities, and picking up more food direct from farms, and there's a waiting list of 300 additional charities to onboard.

"Our message is certainly getting further upstream to the farmers," said Carter. "And that's exactly where we'd like it because of course we get longer life, more nutrients and better quality, and at the other end we're looking for an additional depot in South or West London. While the food and funding are available we will continue to grow."

Turning surplus food into square meals: The tech behind feeding London's hungry

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