Challenge
In 2020, the Oregon Food Bank (OFB) was facing a growing hunger crisis - seeing a sustained increase in demand at food pantries and meal sites of 20-70% and nearly doubling the number of people seeking assistance compared to 2019. As OFB saw an increase in use of their resources, they sought to create a tool—the Food Finder—to help connect communities with the more than 1,400 food pantries, meal sites, and other food resources in Oregon and Southwest Washington.
The challenge in doing so was how to keep an updated listing of over 1,400 food assistance sites—sites that could need to change their listing details with some frequency—and serving a diverse community with various dietary concerns, religious affiliations, spoken language and access to transportation.
Process
Approaching the development of the Food Finder web application, Cast Iron Coding focused on two major aspects of the tool: user experience, and ease of administration.
A User-friendly, Approachable Interface
The tool uses a map-based interface that displays nearby locations and their pertinent details. To meet the diverse needs of users, the team implemented extensive filtering capabilities, including options to filter by free food or SNAP EBT, grocery options, meals, pick-up days, and location. By using an API into Google Maps, the website can be used in 14 different languages, a critical concern as immigrant and refugee communities were experiencing outsized effects of the hunger crisis.
Hassle-free Administration
To help keep the more than 1,400 listings current, the OFB previously would have to manually upload CSV files, an onerous task that could result in outdated information. CIC developed an automated data update mechanism to ensure the seamless management of information about all Oregon Food Bank sites. The solution involved scheduled job tasks to fetch CSV data, and a robust import mechanism to translate data into a readable format for the site's back end.
Results
The impact of the Food Finder was immediate and profound. The website revolutionized access to food assistance, enabling users to easily locate resources in their communities. The timely launch of the Food Finder exemplified the Oregon Food Bank's commitment to addressing the growing need for food assistance — and served as a template for the broader food bank community.
A Healthy, Growing Network
Since launching the Food Finder for OFB, other groups have replicated this approach across the country, including Three Square, Second Harvest, Blue Ridge Area Food Bank, and more are soon to launch.
With this ongoing need, CIC continues to partner with ORB and other food banks in improving the application's functionality and user experience. One recent example is a dynamically-calculated distance filter on search results, which draws a balance between finding sufficient search results for a location without expanding the search distance too far. For users, that means when they search a densely populated area, the radius is small, while searches in more rural areas are expanded to include more options for nearby results. These small adjustments make big differences to users of the site experiencing hunger.
Visit the Food Finder to take a closer look.