Food rescue organizations do a lot with a little. It’s one of the core ethics of the food rescue movement, and it’s part of doing any social impact work in 2022. There’s so much uncertainty in the world right now and funding is tight for everybody. Food rescue organizations may not have the resources to hire enough staff to rescue all the available food. Sometimes it’s all done by volunteers! And for other organizations, it’s a small team of dedicated people who just do it all, no matter how many hours it takes.
Since 87% of surplus food at the retail level is fresh, timing is everything. And there are many steps to getting a single donation of perfectly good, fresh food that’s about to get thrown away, picked up and delivered right away. From identifying best timeframes and a volunteer to pick it up, to ultimately making sure there’s a non-profit nearby that can get it all into the hands of people who need it and can use it all, volunteer management alone can create some of the most time-consuming day-to-day challenges.
Food Rescue Hero was purposefully designed to automate these time-consuming tasks, so you can rescue more food with less staff time. And as more food rescue organizations partner with us, we keep learning more about how to help our partners do the most good in their communities to end food waste and nutrition insecurity.
So we understand how wonderful weekly rescues are. They’re convenient for volunteers, because they fit in perfectly with a volunteer’s weekly schedule. They foster meaningful relationships between the volunteers, the retail food donors and the nonprofits. And best of all, they’re efficient for the food rescue management team, because they don’t take a lot of time to coordinate. They just happen
But weekly volunteers go on vacation, get sick, have appointments, and when a weekly rescue volunteer can’t make it, the dispatcher often faces an urgent situation. Your staff has to drop everything to andspend time to re-juggle the rescue. It can require lots of outreach: emails, texts, phone calls. Lots of extra work on top of everything else.
So it inspired our Food Rescue Hero team to develop a tiny feature that actually does A LOT. It’s called Request a Sub.
Here’s how it works: In that instance that a volunteer can’t make it one week, there’s a button in our app – Request a Sub. In one click, the rescue automatically gets re-served up as a one-time rescue for any volunteer to claim, just like that. For our partners it’s pretty helpful.
Is your team trying to a lot with a little? Contact us and we will give you a FREE consultation to explore if Food Rescue Hero is a good fit for your organization.
