[zipfle]

Make blue apron for food pantries. One summer I volunteered on a kind of food pantry truck; twice a week, we'd load up this box truck with whatever the local supermarkets had donated-- pallets of turnips about to expire, pallets of bread, cucumbers, whatever--and we'd drive to some designated areas, set the food out on tables, and people would line up to collect a share of it. We had to limit based on availability; maybe two loaves of bread, three cucumbers, as many turnips as you want.

The donations we got were usually either past their best or unpopular or both. When food expires, there's a period when it's still fine to eat, but it's best not to leave it too long.

So if you're a single parent working two jobs, and you get home at 7:30 to make dinner and you have a turnip you need to use tonight before it goes bad, what do you do?

Wouldn't it be great if someone with great logistics skill and insight into the stocks of all the area food banks could scrape allrecipes, find the most efficient use of the stock as ingredients, and maybe move some things around so that the people waiting for the trucks could get meal kits with online instructions, rather than just bags of turnips?

Just a thought.

Edit: The cool part of this might end up being the supplier side. I imagine that a supermarket has to work much harder to donate to a food pantry than to just throw out stuff. How could you make it easier for them to donate what was really needed? Could you have finders who go around to stores, enter the stuff to be thrown out into your system, decide what it would be worth it to take, take it, and keep track of yearly donations for the retailer for tax purposes? Could you cut their waste disposal costs and save them taxes and build goodwill?

The bigger idea here is that just because the consumers of your service aren't very focused on new technology doesn't mean that technology can't drive and enable your business model. There are probably many kinds of businesses that provide services to the underprivileged that would benefit from technology in the back office even if technology isn't their product.

[acconrad]

I actually had an idea around that - neighborhood cooking. There is definitely some widow grandmother on my block who would love to make some extra money cooking her awesome meals for her neighbors. And I'd love to pay for that service. Unfortunately state regulations for what is defined as a kitchen and cooking for others has huge health code implications, and never took off.

This, what you're saying, is more of a logistics and resource allocation problem, all needing to be done in real time. Very smart, but would require quite a bit of up-front innovation. I'll ruminate on this idea for sure!

[cfreeman]

I love this idea. I think bringing the idea of blue apron to a lower income market would be amazing, especially if it could take advantage of government incentives. One of the hardest things about cooking healthy is doing all the meal planning.