One of the hardest parts of ramping up our COVID-Relief Grocery program was assigning delivery routes.

As Steph put it “The food delivery requests kept pouring in and our delivery spreadsheet was growing by about 200 entries per week.” The rapid growth meant that every week’s roster of deliveries was different than the week before. And, each day included some number of emergency deliveries—those for new recipients who had called the day before in desperate need of food.

Stretched as thin as they were, our staff struggled to cluster deliveries geographically. We lacked the time, expertise, and software required. Our heroic delivery volunteers would criss-cross Cambridge, sometimes taking 3-4 hours to make 12 deliveries because the routes we’d handed them were so tangled.

Steph says “We were looking into canvassing apps, Google maps, Mapquest, trying to figure out the best way to optimize the driver routes, but always had the issue of every location needing to be geo-coded.” Because we were adding so many new clients every day, getting all the addresses coded each night to generate the next day’s delivery routes was a beast of a challenge. Google Maps can optimize a small number of deliveries, but with 350+ deliveries each day, the process simply took too long to be a sustainable solution.

Enter: Alex Linthicum and Eric Englin.

Both work with a transportation consulting organization in Kendall Square. Eric is a recent grad of the Harvard Kennedy School. Volunteer site-leader Katie Stockman connected them to Food For Free.

Here’s how Alex and Eric described their work:

“In lay terms, we helped Food For Free with two challenges. The first was that Food For Free needed to reduce the time and effort its 30 drivers spent making 350 daily food deliveries. We did this by writing a computer program that clusters delivery addresses into small, proximate groups of between 9 and 12 deliveries for each driver. The second challenge was that Food For Free needed to create route assignments for a new set of 350 addresses every single day. We hosted the program on a very simple website that Food For Free can run on its own, whenever it needs to make route assignments. The program reads addresses and returns delivery assignments using Google Sheets.”

For our program staff, this was a godsend.

Now, we simply mark who on our spreadsheet should get a delivery the next day, then go to the website, plug in the number of drivers we have scheduled, and, in minutes, we have the next day’s delivery lists.

Says Steph, “It’s incredible!! Without this program and their help, we would have wasted hours of staff time trying to change our program to fit other pre-existing route optimization software—and our staff did not have the bandwidth. Alex and Eric met us where we were with what we needed, and crafted this just for us, which is the only way we could possibly have grown the program to almost 2,000 weekly deliveries in a matter of weeks. It is a beautiful story of full-circle help in Cambridge….tech to non-profit.”