In Seattle, using the power of data to fight the problem of hunger

The colorful, hand-built little free pantry in front of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Seattle's Uptown neighborhood is more than it appears.

As the tall and angular architectural jewel of a church tends to the spirits of its parishioners inside, the boxy little pantry outside helps keep a community fed, one can of fruit or box of cereal at a time.

Soon, the small pantry will play a larger role in meeting the growing need of the region's hungry, thanks to a tech upgrade by a University of Washington scientist and the goodwill of Seattleites.

Giacomo Dalla Chiara, a senior research scientist at UW's Urban Freight Lab, said his project could pave the way to an always monitored and regularly replenished network of hundreds of micropantries across the Seattle area.

He described his project as focused on documenting and quantifying the use of micropantries, which operate on a "take what you need, leave what you can model. Yet the pantries are currently limited by a lack of data: People don't know when food has been donated, or what food is needed to help those living nearby make ends meet.

If Dalla Chiara's work is successful, the decentralized network of community cupboards could transform into an Amazon-like, volunteer-driven system of food distribution, regularly getting food as close as it can get to the people who need it the most, which is a significant number considering 11% of Washington households experienced food insecurity in 2024, according to federal figures.

In other words, he wants to bring the power of data to the problem of hunger.

"The beauty of this is it's nothing new," Dalla Chiara said, pointing to the existing systems fighting food insecurity and waste. "But it's a very complicated topic."

For his part, Dalla Chiara is trying to solve what's referred to as the "last mile" problem - delivering food from the big warehouses that store it, in this case places like food banks or grocery stores, to the widely disbursed micropantries tucked into nearly every neighborhood in Seattle. His project is also aiding, on a smaller level, Bellingham-based Sustainable Connections' work to stock community fridges.

In fact, he estimates that 4 million pounds of food cycle through Seattle's 300 micropantries every year - about the weight of the Salish, one of the state's smallest car ferries. It's a remarkable amount, but pales compared with the 250 million pounds of food distributed through the state's emergency food assistance program, or the 29 million pounds of food disbursed through the region's 31 food banks in the Seattle Food Committee network, every year.

Yet unlike food banks, the diffuse little pantries are open 24 hours a day, a convenience that makes them critical, Dalla Chiara said.

The one by St. Paul's, for instance, is visited on average about 23 times a day, according to the last few months of data gathering.

"There's a huge amount of use," Dalla Chiara said, not just at this micropantry, "which, honestly, may not be a good thing."

Little free retrofit

Barbara Potgieter, the treasurer at St. Paul's, helps keep an eye on the little pantry out front, replenishing it from a store of shelves inside the church at a cost of about $800 a month.

"We stock it every single day," she said, adding that "this one gets a lot of support" from neighbors as well.

Potgieter and the church use the old-fashioned method: walking over to the micropantry and looking inside to see if it needs restocking.

With Dalla Chiara's project, that work is about to get slightly redundant.

Beginning in March, Dalla Chiara outfitted four micropantries with sensors that record when the door opens and closes. A scale inside measures weight changes, recognizing when donations come or food is taken. The sensor and scale send real-time data to a website, pantrymap.org, that shows how many pounds of food are in the pantry, when the last donation came and if there are any requests.

Four more micropantries will soon be retrofitted with the tech, but the map shows all the micropantries in the region. Considering the vast majority have yet to be upgraded, the map is relying on neighbors to record what they donated and when to a specific pantry, adding to Dalla Chiara's data set.

In all, the technology for one micropantry comes to about $150, and Dalla Chiara will hand out the code and schematics on how to build the sensor system, for free, to anyone who wants it, with hopes that others will upgrade their neighborhood micropantry.

It's rudimentary, but it's a start. The hard work has yet to begin: using data to help guide how food will be distributed.

Cycling and recycling

Dalla Chiara's project, funded by a National Science Foundation grant, isn't just tech-based. He described the work as a community collaboration involving the University District Food Bank, Cascade Bicycle Club, Ridwell and the Washington State Department of Health.

In other words, the scientist and his data are getting a lot of help, thanks to a fleet of volunteer cyclists from Cascade Bicycle Club's Pedaling Relief Project and thousands of pounds from a food drive by Ridwell, a Seattle-based curbside recycling subscription service for items not covered by city utilities.

Dalla Chiara's idea for the project came from working with Cascade's Pedaling Relief Project, a volunteer-powered group that began in 2020 with "grocery rescues," taking perfectly good, donated food headed for the garbage, and transporting by cargo bike to the U District Food Bank.

Their work with the food bank quickly grew to fill another need. The cargo cyclists would haul food from the food bank to people confined to their homes, which led to stocking micropantries.

"If they had extra food that day, our volunteers would take it and drop it off at a micropantry," said Landon Coates Welsh, who manages the Pedaling Relief Project. "We found they were consistently emptied. … We don't know by who, but clearly by someone who needed food."

That got Dalla Chiara thinking. His overall research focuses on urban transportation and logistics, and the effectiveness of using electric bikes for last-mile delivery. Recently he worked, in part, with the city of Seattle on its work to encourage, and regulate, the use of e-cargo bikes for parcel and restaurant deliveries.

But volunteering with Cascade allowed him to fuse his academic research with a spirit to help people in need.

Joe Gruber, executive director of the U District Food Bank, said last-mile delivery is challenging, and not just for his food bank, which recovers 1 million pounds of food a year from grocery stores, and does 500 home deliveries a week.

Gruber's food bank is just one of many in the city, but its model is similar to others. The U District Food Bank works with 22 stores for grocery recovery, including PCC Community Markets, Whole Foods Market and Trader Joe's. Those rescues, coupled with food donations, bring in about 45% of what the food bank distributes. The rest is purchased by the food bank, itself fueled by monetary donations.

Gruber said people from all over the city come to his food bank, which he said isn't all that surprising since it is so centrally located and easily reached by transit. About 80% of the customers take transit, walk or ride a bike to get there.

It's here - transportation - where free food becomes less than free. With a family budget on the margins, buying gas or bus fare can compete with a loaf of bread.

"We're talking about free food," Dalla Chiara said, "but people still pay."

And that's where Dalla Chiara sees his project making the difference. If his work can successfully monitor micropantries, and keep them stocked with necessary items, it may help the people who need it most, close to home.

"To reliably restock them is beyond the ability of what we can do," Gruber said about his food bank. "This will help folks be more secure in their neighborhood, getting the support they need, where they need it. It's just one more way of reducing a barrier.

This summer, Dalla Chiara's project will begin in full, before it concludes in October. The U District Food Bank has about 10,000 pounds of food from the Ridwell drive dedicated to the micropantries. The cycling volunteers at Cascade will take that food and regularly stock as many as the micropantries as they can - not just the eight in Dalla Chiara's project, but all over.

In the end, Dalla Chiara seeks to quantify goodwill, no easy thing.

But he said if the system of altruism behind every micropantry is better understood, then our own charity is better understood. And that's good for everyone.

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