Share@MealConnect is an innovative product designed for organizations to help reduce hunger in the U.S. by making charitable food donations as simple as texting a friend. Launched in October 2024, it leverages the MealConnect platform to share donations with an extensive nationwide network of partner food banks.
In 2022, 38% of the 235 million tons in the U.S. food supply went unsold or uneaten[1]. Yet only a small fraction of this surplus reaches the charitable food system, which is in urgent need of additional resources. Despite this excess, more than 47 million people in the US face hunger, including 1 in 5 children[2]. Sourcing more food can help solve this problem but the effort needed to share information about surplus food with partner organizations is a crucial limiting factor.
By carefully listening to users, we built an innovative product that dramatically reduces the effort, energy, and knowledge required to share information about excess food. This greater information about opportunities could help source a lot more food and reduce hunger in the US.
Our solution leverages large language models to parse details from text messages into a structured representation of donations. This user interface format minimizes the number of questions that needs to be asked and provides an interface that is easy to plug into existing real-world workflows.
Eligible users are able to supply images to help speed up the process of describing a donation. In some cases, a single image can successfully supply most of the important information to create a donation. Image processing is part of a limited preview.
We created a user-focused security model that allows users to create new donations without needing to remember login details. The only requirement is that users are already registered in the platform.
We heavily optimized the donation intake experience to focus on speed, supporting intake of new donations into the platform from unauthenticated users in under fifteen seconds from start to finish. This is up to 5x faster than existing intake methods.
Donations that flow into the platform are shared on MealConnect, an existing platform that connects donations to a network of over thirteen thousand non-profit partners. MealConnect has successfully processed billions of pounds of food donations, making it a clear choice for matching.
We extensively redesigned our donation intake process to let users rapidly review our understanding of their donation. This included building a method to display a 3D representation of donations back to the user in a format that is optimized for speed on mobile devices.
