For the UK’s foodbanks, the pandemic has presented a severe problem: as demand has surged, supplies have stalled. Lockdown has curtailed in-person donations and emptied supermarket shelves of tinned and longlife goods. Some foodbanks have had to close due to lack of food and resources. But a tiny tech start-up is offering a solution.
Bankuet launched last year as a donation service for foodbanks. The app’s initial purpose was to reduce inefficiency and end food waste. “As a foodbank volunteer I’d seen them constantly getting too much pasta and baked beans, but not enough tampons and rice,” said Bankuet founder Robin Ferris. “And I knew consumer tech could fix it.”
Through the app, donors purchase food bundles for their chosen foodbank; Bankuet then buys products that the foodbank has requested, at a bulk discount, in a zero-waste, just-in-time operation. During lockdown, when it has become a safe and convenient way to give to foodbanks, the company has seen donations rise by 5000%.
Last year, Ferris’s one-man operation shipped 15,000 items in total; since March it has delivered more than 100,000. “I was suddenly getting donations every minute – they came so fast I had to change my inbox. We’ve had to scale up all our processes very quickly. In January it was a tiny team, this month we’ve had our 100th volunteer.”
The demand for foodbank donations is urgent and unprecedented. A Food Foundation report found that 1.5 million people went a whole day without food in the first three weeks of lockdown. The Independent Food Aid Network reported that some of their foodbanks have seen a 300% rise in use while struggling to source appropriate provisions. In London, mayor Sadiq Khan has appealed to people to give financially to make up for the loss of in-person food donations.
At Kensington Olympia, the exhibition hall is now lined with trestle tables where hundreds of pallets of fruit juice, vegetable soup, UHT milk and more are broken down and packed into boxes by volunteers each week. The events space reopened as a crisis distribution hub for west London foodbanks in mid-April, and food parcels are being delivered directly to homes by a fleet of black cabs.
This week it received the second of a number of bulk orders Bankuet is fulfilling in partnership with Morrison’s. More major orders are on their way to foodbanks in Manchester, Coventry, Gateshead, Southampton, Brighton and the Isle of Wight. Many have signed up to the service in the wake of the pandemic. “The word is spreading,” said Ferris. “We’re now serving ten times as many foodbanks as we were at Christmas and our first Scottish foodbank, in Angus and Dundee, is about to come online.”
Ferris was working in the record industry when he came up with the idea for Bankuet. “I was reading headlines about food poverty on my own doorstep, so I started a food collection point at my local Co-op. I was picking up the food, sorting it at my flat, driving it to the food bank. Having worked through the digital transformation of the music industry I just thought: why isn’t there an easier way to donate?”
His pilot scheme quickly found supporters among London’s busy foodbank network. The manager at Wandsworth foodbank, Dan Frith, said it is now “the most helpful way for people to donate food to us”, and the quickest way for his organisation to update their stocks with the items they need.
“I always hoped Bankuet would become a solution to getting food to people who needed it in a crisis situation,” said Ferris. “I didn’t know the crisis would be this big.”