At Harvest Algoma, hundreds of thousands of pounds of donated food is handled annually and distributed to those in need throughout the Algoma District. But cataloguing it all involved hours of paperwork that took valuable time away from more pressing needs.
That all changed last year when the food resource centre partnered with Acorn Information Systems, a division of the Sault Ste. Marie Innovation Centre, to develop a new app that would digitize and streamline the inventory system.
The Harvest Food Hub app is a user-friendly solution that tracks food going in and out, manages staff and volunteer activity, and organizes data for easy reporting.
Harvest Algoma received a $100,000 grant from the Ontario Trillium Foundation to fund its development.
David Thompson, Harvest Algoma’s interim executive director and the director at the Rural Agri-Innovation Network, said they’ve noticed a measurable difference since the organization switched to a digital system.
“Some of the return on investment for us has been just that freed up staffing time that we had from the pen-and-paper (logs) over to this system,” he said during a Dec. 9 webinar introducing the tool.
“Also, the volunteers are able to have more areas that they can have a focus on, as opposed to just straight up administration.”
Established in 2017, Harvest Algoma was operated by the United Way of Sault Ste. Marie and Algoma until 2023, when the innovation centre took over.
The organization “rescues” food that is still good to eat but may not meet requirements for a retailer to sell it, in addition to partnering with Second Harvest, which sources and delivers truckloads of food items, Thompson said.
Harvest Algoma distributes those donations to food banks in Sault Ste. Marie and across the Algoma District, as far north as Wawa and east to Elliot Lake.
In total, Harvest Algoma annually rescues more than 550,000 pounds of food, which is distributed to about 60 partner agencies that pass it on to people in need.
On-site greenhouses grow additional food for distribution, and students often visit the site to learn about the process and help out.
What can’t be rescued is collected by the environmental awareness group Clean North, composted, and then distributed to local farms where food is grown and donated back to the food bank.
Harvest Algoma is doing important work. But with a small team of four employees and about 30 volunteers, every minute is precious, and logging all those transactions was soaking up a lot of time, Thompson said.
“We had logs of food that was coming in right from various sources that our drivers would be getting. We would have food coming in from our greenhouse that we were also tracking, and then we had pen-and-paper logs of working with those food banks and agencies that were serving their constituents and their clients with the food that we were bringing in,” Thompson said.
“So we had a lot of pen-and-paper logs, and that led to a lot of data entry.”
Thompson estimated it amounted to about 12,000 log entries, or 70 hours, a year, which is “a considerable amount of time,” he said, making it easy to fall months behind on reporting.
Enter Acorn Information Solutions, another division of the Sault innovation centre.
In operation since 1999, Acorn works with public and private sector clients to find digital solutions in the areas of software, data analysis and geographic information systems (GIS).
Shawn Croisier, the innovation centre’s vice-president of sales and operations, called Acorn a “catalyst for growth” within the province's information technology sector.
“These types of ideas where a local partner comes to us and builds technology is one of the main reasons why we exist,” Croisier said.
“We love working with individuals to take ideas and turn them into technological solutions.”
Acorn often uses common code — widely used programming language — in building its apps, which can then be adopted for different applications.
That's true of Harvest Hub, which has its origins in KEyON, registration software Acorn designed for the province's EarlyON children's centres.
“This technology uses a very similar pathway of QR (quick response) codes, trusted logins, how you manage staffing at the sites,” Croisier said. “So we were able to leverage a lot of that technology and quickly ramp it up and change it a little bit for the business workflows that Dave identified.”
Using a tablet, staff and volunteers can log in and out, new retailers and food banks can be registered with the system, food can be weighed (with an accompanying scale), reports can be created, and the flow of food can be monitored.
The program is fully customizable for the organization using it, and data is stored in the cloud, via Canadian servers, making it a “100 per cent made-in-Canada solution,” Croisier added.
“Talking with some of the staff members and some of the volunteers, it’s been a life-changing event for a lot of these people, for just managing how they do their jobs on a day-to-day basis,” he said.
Acorn is already considering an upgraded version of the app and is currently soliciting feedback from other food banks or resource centres interested in collaborating on developing it further.
More organizations using the technology could help Acorn leverage additional funds to make those improvements, Croisier said.
“This is how we grow some of our other technology solutions — we just grow organically,” he said.
“We think that there’s just ways of making life easier and keep pushing that technology ball up the hill a little bit and solve problems.”