More than two million people in the UK use food banks to help put meals on their table. Over the past five years, demand for these vital charitable and community-led services has spiked. At FareShare, we are the UK’s largest food redistribution charity. We take food industry surplus and send it through our network of warehouses to around 9,500 charities across the UK. Each week, we provide almost a million meals for vulnerable people. Like the rest of the charity sector, we are low on capacity. The increase in demand caused by the cost of living crisis and the effects of Covid leave us with difficult decisions to make. Even though we have gone from distributing around 16,000 tons of food to more than 50,000 tons annually, supply does not meet demand. We cannot always meet the needs of the voluntary sector. Instead, we must make difficult decisions about where we allocate food. We must maximise our impact and squeeze as much social value as possible out of the food we have. This can leave us in the position of having to make some impossible decisions when we have limited supplies. SOLVING PROBLEMS There are many questions to answer if we are to achieve the best possible impact. How do we maximise the social value of our food? Are we sending our supplies to the most deprived areas, the most populous areas? How can we optimise our van routes? How can we distribute foods in a way that reduces road miles to cut our CO2 footprint, whilst maintaining supplies and variety of produce? To help with this, we have worked with Dr Anna-Lena Sachs in Lancaster University Management School, and PhD researchers in the STOR-i Centre for Doctoral Training. By bringing together this group of research specialists, we can start to use our data to help us solve challenges in a smarter way. Everyone at Lancaster showed a real curiosity about FareShare and our problems, asking relevant questions. Those queries and the framing of them started to unearth the basis of some of the issues we face. DATA DIVE To analyse these questions, we were able to conduct a data dive – an intense period of analysis of our data – with more than 100 PhD students from STOR-i and the Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in Foundations of Data Science. The PhD researchers we worked with were inquisitive, curious, intelligent, engaged, and excited about helping us to use our data to answer organisational challenges. Looking at vast quantities of data, they helped to set us on the road to new practice and solutions. For example, 20 |
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTI5NzM=