- [Talib] Food insecurity is defined as
limited or uncertain access to adequate food,
with nearly one in four households
experiencing food insecurity during the pandemic.
And a Northwestern study found that
food insecurity has more than tripled
among households with kids.
That means that parents and their children are going hungry
in a country where over a hundred billion pounds of food
is wasted every year.
That's nearly 40% of all food in America.
The issue isn't a lack of food,
it's a lack of access to the food.
Meanwhile, over 90% of Americans have a cell phone,
that was when Not Impossible,
an incubator dedicated to solving real-world problems
through technology came up with the idea for Bento.
Bento is a text message based platform
that helps connect people in need of food,
with prepaid meals at local restaurants and grocery stores.
It's currently in eight cities
and has supplied over 150,000 meals in its first year
to people through enterprise partners
like Santa Monica College,
the Boys and Girls Club of America and the VA.
And over next year,
the company is aiming to serve 1 million meals.
(upbeat music)
I spoke with the founders of Bento
on "My World Changing Ideas Podcast" about their vision.
- This is such an urgent problem.
Can you talk a little bit about your partnership
with Genpact and whether that helped quicken the process
in this case.
- In just our pilot cities,
we're close to 150,000 meals served,
all through this frictionless system
that doesn't require any outside
kind of complicated infrastructure to see it be fulfilled.
And then enter Genpact into the situation,
and their ability to kind of really see
how a world works in this digital space
and how to streamline it
and make it efficient,
and fine tune it,
because that's really what we're striving for here.
At the end of the day,
when Adam and I talk about the longterm vision of Bento,
it's to graduate people off of Bento
and to get them to be members of society
and to have their lives fulfilled,
and be happy and not have that constant stress.
And when you start to look at a company like Genpact,
who's really about these deep insights
and how to create scenarios around a user experience
and data to really generate a positive outcome,
that's typically in the business world,
now when you apply that
to this massive social issue called food insecurity,
I think you can see why we're so excited
about what the outcomes might be.
- Are you able to kind of consider
people's nutritional needs and preferences,
that they might need for their own health outcomes.
- Being able to start tailoring the nutritional criteria
for all meals on our platform is becoming paramount for us.
We wanna be able to raise the bar in general.
There's a high correlation between those
that are food insecure with diabetes
and obesity rates in our country.
And so full stop, we wanna make sure
that we are doing everything we can
to start bending the curve on that.
And Genpact has amazing skills and machine learning
and natural language processing,
which are gonna be deployed to a very specific use case
that is high priority for us.
That's gonna create a lot of efficiencies,
which is around being able to better
and more efficiently curate healthy menu options.
(dramatic music)
- [Talib] We spoke with Sanjay Srivastava,
chief digital officer from Genpact,
about how they can help Bento achieve
their vision at scale.
- [Sanjay] What Genpact is doing is taking that platform
and helping them expand into health outcomes,
driving health outcomes.
And you do that by not only serving meals,
but by serving nutritious meals,
by serving medically tailored meals
for specific segments of their population.
So very simply what we do is this,
we're building a dynamic intelligence platform.
It's a platform that ingests the information
that's required to make decisions,
that applies matching algorithms and rule sets
to be able to do the matching.
So think about any matching service,
and then it actually takes that and applies it
to the orders that come through.
In all of this, we're capturing the data,
we're then able to use the data
to match it against outcomes,
and then you get to a point where you have
evidence supported approaches
to how you deliver nutritious meals
and that's the outcome we're driving.
(soft music)
- When you address medical conditions with food,
all of a sudden you're getting to the core root
of the problem.
What are the ramifications that it would have on society
as well as kind of the medical industry
and the medical side of the world?
The answer is massive.