There's 54 million people in the United States that are self-identified as food insecure.
Of those 54 million people, 37 of them visit a food pantry on a regular basis.
What about the millions of people that are in between that can't access a food pantry?
Those are the people that we're addressing with Wellfare,
with our direct-to-door deliveries.
Wellfare kind of came about as a direct result of the pandemic.
So what my co-founder Cole and I were doing at the start of the pandemic was,
we really leveraged our networks from our previous lives working in marketing and advertising.
What we were able to do with that was, we leveraged the relationships that we'd established
with some of the best better for you food and beverage brands in the country
and then being able to help them feed health care workers during a time of crisis.
It was during the deliveries for that time of crisis that we really identified a much
larger more nefarious problem in the country and that was food insecurity writ large.
We got to witness it here in New York City.
The problem exists across the country, across the U.S.
We took the relationships that we established with these better for you companies,
we started to figure out what are different ways to be able to get their products
into the homes of food insecure populations across New York City.
And over the past year my co-founder and I have been building out Wellfare,
which is taking everything of the traditional food pantry model and flipping it on its head.
That's inspired by all these incredible direct-to-door grocery services
and pointing it to a community that isn't offered those types of services
that doesn't get to enjoy
this incredible innovation boom from the food and beverage industry.
Since the beginning of this year
we've been delivering incredible donated healthy food
directly to the doors of a thousand households in Brooklyn
and we have grand aspirations
to continue growing this program in New York City and beyond.
What we're looking to do is
we're looking to identify families who self-identify as food insecure,
who live in public housing, who receive SNAP benefits.
And who are looking for that help to be able to eat healthier.
When we think about ourselves as a food pantry fit for the 21st century,
we'd really like to think and we'd like to be inspired by the brands
that we buy into ourselves as customers.
So one of the sort of approaches that we've really learned from is
learning about our customer in the process.
What are their needs?
What are their wants?
How do we get that better to them?
How do we listen to them on a more regular and honest basis?
And so what we do at Wellfare is we have regular check-ins with our
subscribers with the households that we serve and we're able to understand what their nutritional
needs and what their wants are and then be able to meet them every other week in our deliveries.
Be able to procure food that we know will serve them best
and will serve their health best.
So this is how it works.
We work with incredible coalition of better for you food and beverage brands
from across the country that donate extra product to us.
Healthy snacks, beverages, and pantry goods like pastas and oat milks
that get delivered right to our warehouse in Queens,
and from there we bring in a group of volunteers. Individuals from across New York City
that want to give back and help us pack these boxes
that we deliver directly to the doors of our subscribing households.
After packing boxes in our warehouse in Queens, we bring them down to Brooklyn
where we meet another group of volunteers that are ready to make our deliveries.
We pair volunteers in teams of two,
give them a dolly, a bunch of boxes and delivery route
and send them on their way and they're going in and out of different public
housing buildings across this area that we've targeted and launched in
and making deliveries directly to the door.
We currently serve a thousand households across Brooklyn and we regularly do check-in calls
with our subscribers to see what type of impact we're making.
We're helping families that are really struggling to get by save money
and also bring in healthy food through the door.
And beyond that, the effects of having healthier food around
really trickle down across the entire household.
Our subscribing households are multi-generational.
So we see some subscribers that are 80 years old,
and we have subscribers that have kids that are 8 years old in the household.
And being able to have access to healthy grab-and-go snacks and drinks,
things to make dinner with really has an incredible impact.
People are loving the products. They love how they make them feel
and at the end of the day they're saving money.
Food pantries do really good work across this country.
Food banks have been serving millions of Americans across several decades.
but there are millions of Americans that are left out.
Namely those that are working multiple jobs, those that don't have means of transport.
The elderly.
The disabled.
Being able to meet their needs at the door is a game changer.
We think over time just being able to be subscribed to a healthy food service
can be game changing for all those that are visiting food pantries
and those that can't make it.
We know that we have a huge problem that we're tackling.
That's much more than just getting donated food to people's doors.
We want to create food security.
We want to build a new model that becomes a comprehensive replacement
to the food pantry system and maybe something even grander.
What we see day to day since starting Wellfare is
this incredible energy across different sectors, across all our stakeholders
to see real change in the status quo.
So whether we're talking with food brands that want to donate products,
subscribers that want to eat better just face barriers to do so.
Volunteers that are looking for real impactful opportunities
and donors that are looking for a disruptive new model that
challenges the decades-old approach of great depression style breadlines at pantries.
We see an incredible energy, and again an opportunity to create something incredibly grand.