With cuts to food assistance, can apps help hungry Americans?

CHICAGO - Once a homeless panhandler who begged for money to eat, Dameon now gets help from a food network in Chicago powered by an app to get his groceries.

"I'm surviving by the grace. Little by little, I'm able to make it to the next day and the next week," said Dameon, who asked for his surname not to be used.

He gets two bags of donated fresh food each month from the non-profit Brave Space Alliance in Chicago's Southside.

The food is delivered to the community centre by a volunteer with an app called Food Rescue Hero that non-profits are using   to retrieve food that otherwise would be wasted and deliver it to people in need.

Non-profits are using such technology to improve access and distribution of fresh food and to combat food waste, and research shows it has helped decrease food insecurity and improved diets of people in need.

Research by Stanford University found the Food Rescue Hero app offered a potential solution to the crises of food waste and food insecurity, and a study by the University of Pittsburgh found in the areas where it was used, food insecurity significantly decreased and people had healthier diets.

Non-profits addressing food waste such as Flashfood, Olio and Too Good to Go are using apps to retrieve and distribute fresh food as well.

As much as 40% of food produced in the United States is wasted, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The Food Rescue Hero app shows volunteers where donations from restaurants and other locations are available for pick-up to deliver to food pantries, shelters and hunger relief organisations.

Its emphasis is on collecting donated food from nontraditional sources, such as a corporate luncheon event with leftovers or surplus food from grab-and-go vendors at airports.

"It's a game-changing, powerful technology that allows us to decentralise food transportation and scale in a way that is just not possible without a really intuitive technology," said Jake Tepperman, executive director of Chicago Food Rescue, an anti-hunger nonprofit.

With just two employees and no office or fleet of drivers in his organisation, Tepperman says the technology enables them to create a network of donors and maximise the use of volunteers to deliver food that might otherwise be headed to a landfill.

Food deserts and food insecurity

Almost 19 million Americans or 6% of the population live in food deserts - neighbourhoods without grocery stores nearby, according to the USDA.

Additionally, about 10% of U.S. households - or 13.5 million homes - are food insecure, meaning they do not have enough food or do not know where their next meal is coming from, according to 2022 government data.

The goal of the Food Rescue Hero app is to meet people in need “where they are," Tepperman said, such as delivering to homes or standalone community refrigerators.

In less than a year of using the app, his non-profit has diverted the equivalent of 88,000 meals to hungry Chicagoans instead of to landfills, he said.

"That hasn't existed in Chicago in a meaningful way until now," Tepperman told Context/Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The technology utilises geolocation, which involves GPS, wifi, IP addresses and cellular networks, as well as AI-generated algorithms to assist non-profits.

Organisations in about two dozen cities in the U.S. and Canada use the Food Rescue Hero app. The goal is to reach 100 cities in the next five years.

Cuts to government food assistance

Non-profits say cuts to government food assistance programmes pose the likelihood that food insecurity among Americans will increase.

In July, the Trump administration slashed $187 billion over the next ten years from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the nation's largest food aid programme. It was the largest cut in the programme's history.

Alyssa Cholodofsky, CEO of the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based non-profit 412 Food Rescue, which created the Food Rescue Hero app, said the federal government traditionally has been the largest source of helping people meet basic needs.

"As that changes or pulls back, it's just hard because foundations are limited, companies are limited, people's resources are limited," she said.

"It leaves a lot of people in some pretty difficult situations."

About 42 million Americans such as Dameon, or 12.5 percent of the U.S. population receive SNAP benefits, and the average benefit is $187 a month.

Dameon receives $91 each month.

The nonpartisan Center for Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that with less money from the federal government, food assistance will disappear or be slashed significantly for about four million Americans.

Asked for comment, a USDA spokesperson said: "As with usual practice, USDA will provide states with an implementation memorandum that will assist and instruct states on how to properly comply with and implement any new regulations or federal laws."

Dameon said he vacillates between faith and fear over whether he will lose some or all of his benefits.

"If I was to lose SNAP benefits, there would be a way that I just feel that God would provide something, because it's not the end of the world," he said.

"You feel that it is, with the way that we're going," he added.

(Reporting by Natasha Ghoneim. Editing by Anastasia Moloney and Ellen Wulfhorst.)