Job statement
When food is sitting in the warehouse and starting to age, I want to send the right items to the
pantries that can actually use them, including small ones I can’t see today, so I move it out before it
spoils and it reaches people who want it.
The job in two languages
- Nonprofit framing: A food-bank program manager has to clear warehouse stock before spoilage but
doesn’t know each pantry’s current capacity or what its visitors actually need or eat, so the wrong
food goes to the wrong place and gets wasted. Small, disconnected pantries are invisible to him.
- Developer translation: An allocation/visibility tool over (privacy-safe) aggregated pantry data:
current capacity, inventory, visitor preferences and consumption, plus a regional map that surfaces
pantries, including newly-joined small ones, to inform what to send where.
Process / Flow
Desired-state flow (from the designs): view aggregated pantry inventory/orders (no PII) → see regional
map incl. new/small pantries → match warehouse stock to capacity + demonstrated need → distribute.
Current-state flow is a GAP: how Dan decides allocations today needs interviews. (This is a
classic missing-data problem: he’s largely operating without the data, with waste as the consequence.)
Use cases / user stories
Business case (why it’s worth building)
- Impact / theory of change: If Dan can see real capacity and demonstrated need across his region, we
believe less food spoils, allocation matches demand, and small disconnected pantries get pulled into
support. The “special sauce” here is the data collection as much as the product.
- Market sizing: see market-research/sizing-data.md (Iteration 2)
Why it’s hard
This is mostly a greenfield, missing-data problem: the data doesn’t exist in usable form today, and
gathering it must never expose client PII. See sector/why-this-is-hard.md
(data fragmentation, disconnection from networks, trust).