Food for thought

Enhancing efficiency at Gleaners2Go

During the pandemic, job loss and resulting food insecurity greatly increased the need for food assistance from Gleaners Food Bank in Indianapolis. The organization responded by ramping up Gleaners2Go, a program that lets neighbors place food orders and pick up those filled orders outside of usual food pantry hours. But as needs grew, the program was unable to keep up. Because of our partnership with Gleaners, THG representatives learned of this problem and offered some help creating more efficient operations that might allow them to meet their goal of serving 500 families per week.

A member of THG’s first graduating Lean class, Jessica Nelson, Maintenance Engineer at Asphalt Materials Inc., took on the Gleaners2Go project as a volunteer in March 2022. At that time, the Gleaners2Go program served an average of 64 families a week, and each order took about 21.8 minutes of volunteer time to process.

Lean is a continuous improvement methodology that reduces or eliminates waste and improves process flow.