- Food insecurity existed before the pandemic.
The pandemic really just exacerbated the problem
and shined a spotlight on this chronic issue
that had been plaguing our country for decades.
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- [Narrator] In the United States,
food insecurity isn't caused by a lack of food,
but by a lack of access to food.
It affected one in four households in 2019,
and the COVID-19 pandemic only exacerbated the situation.
With food banks pushed to their limits,
it's clear that traditional methods aren't enough
and we need innovative ideas to tackle this pervasive issue.
Not Impossible Labs is an incubator
that uses design and technology to create solutions
to real-world problems.
- We saw at essentially the dawn of the pandemic,
March, April, 2020, we saw school closures taking place.
And we said, okay, this is not good.
There's a lot of kids who are at at risk communities
who are going to lose their free or reduced meals.
And that was one of our fundamental motivations.
We have plenty of food in this country,
but we just don't have the ability to connect the food,
the sources of food, to the people who need the food.
It's a supply chain issue.
It's an operational issue.
It's a logistics issue.
We went back into the lab and we started to think about this
and brainstorm and we ended up interviewing
a group down the street from us called Safe Place for Youth.
And we sat down with the homeless kids.
So we went for a population
that really could relate to this.
And we asked them, what is it that you desire most?
What is it that you need most in life?
And we expected answers like food, clothing, water, shelter,
and they answered a cell phone.
It caught us off guard.
But what we realized after taking that back
and starting to study it is that first of all,
96% of the people in this country, they have a cell phone.
Whether you live in a penthouse or sleep in your car,
you have a cell phone.
Maybe that's how we'll be able to create a solution
so that people can get food that is close to them,
that is healthy, gives them a way to be dignified
in how they claim their food.
So they're not forced to stand in a line and be identified
as someone who is either poor or food insecure.
How can we use that phone as that point
and Postmates and Uber Eats and food delivery platforms
like that, they already have every restaurant
in this country that are part of their system.
So now our distribution sites,
as opposed to being just one here and one there,
and one in downtown and one on the west side,
now we've got this labyrinth,
all of these different nodes of distribution.
So we said, okay, great,
now we've got our supply box checked.
Now, how do we get to the demand?
So then we started to reach out
to community-based organizations like the YMCA
and the Boys and Girls Club, to healthcare organizations
like St. John's or Providence,
and even organizations like the VA.
- Those organizations define the eligibility parameters
and make benefit available to those in their community
that meet those parameters.
Once they're deemed eligible,
then we enroll them onto our text message service,
and they're able to start ordering meals.
Text the word "hungry".
It then starts a series of text prompts.
We manually geo-locate you.
And we now offer a list of up to 10 different restaurants
or grocery stores.
You then choose your menu option.
You're given a confirmation number
and you walk into either the restaurant
or the grocery store and claim your food.
- [Narrator] The meals are prepaid for
via the organizations the person has accessed Bento through.
- They text. They don't have to download an app.
They get to walk into a restaurant and pick up a meal.
And the restaurant, an order comes in,
just like any other order.
The restaurant gets paid for it.
They make the order and they stick it to the side
for the person to walk in.
No behavior changes have had to happen.
And that's why this thing has taken off
the way that it has.
- Bento is operating across the United States
in nine cities today.
One of the biggest challenges that we have
when we are rolling this out and scaling the solution
is educating the organizations
that serve at risk communities
that Bento is not just an available service
that they can use and deploy,
but it's a more effective solution
than relying on government food assistance and food banks
in local communities.
It's one thing to eliminate food insecurity
from somebody's world.
It's another thing to engage them in the next step.
Now that they're not worried about where their next meal
is coming from,
what can we do so that they take those next steps,
whether that's job training,
whether that's behavioral health services,
whether that's primary care healthcare screenings?
- Now we're dealing with massive societal issues
and we're using food as that tip of the arrow
to build the trust with that person,
and then be able to expand into other aspects of need
within their lives.
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