DoorFresh aspires to address the challenge of food supply chain, which has been disrupted due to COVID-19 pandemic, by offering home delivery of food and grocery items. We analyzed that the COVID-19 pandemic has created a vicious circle of increased demand and supply shortages, leading to higher risk of spreading the infection and its socioeconomic impact to people. There have been number of instances of people crowding stores, and hoarding food and essential items, fearing supply shortages due to business lock-down and shelter-in-place regulations in their cities. This has led to many stores running out of their inventory (which could not have been planned due to unforeseen demand spike) leaving a large segment of consumers not getting their desired food and essential items. The crowding stores has also increased the risk of spread of infection to both consumers and workers, potentially prolonging the pandemic and its cure, and extended regulations. The supply chain of food from farm to stores has been severely constrained due to limited transportation, inter/intra-state travel restrictions resulting, lack of labor and materials resulting in crop spoilage especially for fresh produce and income loss for the stakeholders.
DoorFresh is our project that allows people to order their groceries from local stores and have food and fresh produce delivered to their door. What makes this project unique is that neighbors or community volunteers are provided the opportunity to pick up orders for their neighbors. This helps to break the vicious circle by first letting people stay at home, reduce the spread of infection, reduce stock piling, reduce the strain on supply chain, and possibly helping shorten the pandemic. Consequently, this should also help relax the regulations, aiding the transportation and logistics of food supply from farm to stores and reducing the crop wastage. We plan to tie up directly with farmers to source fresh produce and supply to consumers. This would help farmers, who are limited in their capabilities to deliver fresh produce locally, to improve their cash flow. Particularly for senior living communities, we plan to roll out this service to help our seniors and offer convenience of home delivery.
Our team was inspired to choose this challenge when we noticed a problem in our local community. We found that many of our neighbors were travelling to local grocery stores like Costco and Safeway to stock pile products fearing supply shortages due to COVID-19 pandemic. When we went to these stores, we observed that there were so many shoppers which made it very difficult to implement the social distancing requirements . We were worried that this condition would only increase the risk, to shoppers and workers, of spreading the infection. In addition, since many individuals were hoarding supplies for themselves and their families, many stores were running out of essential products at a rapid pace. We also realized that some people may have been taking too many products than they actually consumed, and were depriving others. To develop this project, we worked with the goal of providing people with essential groceries and being able to keep them safe at homes practicing social distancing. After conducting research on NASA's platforms, we learned that there was another problem relating to the food supply being faced by many other countries over the globe. We learned from the World Food Programme that over 14 million individuals in Latin America and the Caribbean were having to skip meals due to lack of food supply in this pandemic. Although we plan to make DoorFresh a mobile application available on the App Store and Google Play, we have initially started out by creating a website for DoorFresh. We customized our website with the help of Shopify and integrated the payment gateway, emails, and digital marketing. In order to better understand the needs and preferences of our community, seniors and disabled, we shared a Google Form to collect their inputs. The responses we received were very encouraging and showed a great need for this type of application and delivery service. Therefore, we went ahead with developing our website. Although we have had a short time boundary to work on this idea so far, we plan to expand our project in the near future. We will integrate features that allow shoppers to communicate with their neighbors and have real time integration of inventory with the stores.
NASA Earth Data Resource Examples for Agriculture - World Food Programme:
NASA Earth Data Resource Examples for Agriculture - Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations:
NASA COVID-19 data pathfinders:
NASA SEDAC Global COVID-19 Viewer: