Just had this idea that I feel like I need to put out there before I forget it. Currently South Bend has a problem with what are called food deserts, areas where people do not have easy access to nutritious food. This is because of a lack of transportation and no stores within walking distance. The solution proposed by the eating well is to place non-profit grocery stores within the food desert. This works in a limited way, but still has problems. Depending on the size of the food dessert, one store wouldnt be enough, and customers still have to have the time to walk there or take public transportation to the store. This could prove problematic for some, if you lack transportation to the store you also lack transportation to work. So even putting the store in the desert may not be sufficient for those who do not also work close to the store or home due to the additional time constraints this places on them. I thought there might be a way to serve a wider area in a more convenient way while better using a grocery stores economies of scale, which from a non-profit standpoint should translate into lower prices for the already low income area being served. But there are a lot of unanswered questions. The basic premise is that rather than reducing the distance between the customer and the store, we substitute customer transportation for the business transporting the food. Admittedly this results in a far less holistic solution to poor nutrition in the community because the eating well was also going to offer classes and information on maintaining good health. But the positive side of the trade-off is that it could potentially allow a broader area to be served with lower prices. First I thought, maybe we should have a food truck, but with groceries instead of a restaurant. However the inventory of a given truck would be too limited to remain sustainable through volume like a normal grocery store. So maybe we should try to allow remote ordering of food and delivering it from a large central warehouse. This should allow more efficient inventory management and greater volume to remain sustainable at a lower profit margin. This presents quite a few problems: How can we keep the delivery costs low enough to make it worth it to people, how can we take orders? These are low income people who may not have computers or smart phones to order online or through an app and ordering through the phone would be too inconvenient. Would it be possible for them to work on a subscription basis and receive certain food regularly? If this were the case we could possibly send out catalogs and receive subscriptions by mail. This seems like it would be a good way to encourage long term management of eating habits. Which could lead to better nutrition than current grocery stores which arrange the food to allow for more impulse buying. How can we make sure that we get the food to people at a time when they are available to take the food in to their house, because many grocery items cannot be simply dropped off? How well could this work for people who live in apartment buildings? How could we design the system to make it easy to respond to changes in someones schedule. If we used delivery trucks they may need specialized containers for certain items such as frozen items depending on how long delivery time is and we would always need people on call to deliver at irregular intervals based on the customers schedule. What about drones? I know that they are being considered to replace some delivery applications but would they be useful for this? It seems like for this to work we need to know how much weight they can carry, what containers we can use with them to preserve the food, how costly it would be to make a delivery with them, can we program them to automatically make a series of several deliveries? Weight limit would be particularly important if we want customers to be able to save by ordering in bulk, or if we want to cut delivery costs by doing a series of them without the drone having to make another trip to the warehouse. Is automated drone delivery even remotely possible at this point? If Im not mistaken drones still require remote pilots. Another question for this area would be what weather conditions can drones work in, all the demonstrations Ive seen took place on sunny days with no rain, snow, wind, or any other obstacles to deal with. Another issue would be what should we have in our inventory. If this is intended to create value by improving nutrition while keeping costs down do we want to try and aim for high quality food and essentially be a cheaper more convenient whole foods or do we want to emphasize the cost reduction and carry mostly generics? Would carrying both be viable? Would this become more viable in the future when companies finish developing self-driving cars? Yes thats a thing This seems less likely unless we also devise a system which allows the food to be deployed in a way that allows customers to easily pick it up. For now Im just throwing the idea out there before I forget it. Its entirely possible that delivery costs may render this model too inefficient to compete in the for profit market or help low income people in the non-profit sector regardless of the delivery method.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 21:19:07 +0000
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