Route The Meals

To support people in need, WFP uses an intricate logistics network comprising thousands of delivery sites, warehouses and ports. This effort is complicated and often disrupted by access constraints, geo-political turmoil and climate-related shocks. Ensuring timely deliveries in this context is already a challenge, but WFP must design these supply chains to be as efficient, resilient and sustainable as possible amid increasing needs and reduced resources.

Route The Meals enhances WFP’s logistics by optimizing food delivery efficiency. Using advanced algorithms, Route The Meals provides insights on where to establish new warehouses and hubs, how to optimally plan dispatches and which last-mile routes to take. This ensures quick and reliable food assistance, whether it’s for school meals, nutrition programmes, or general distribution.

RTM also supports local governments and partners with technical assistance, strengthening WFP and other stakeholders' ability to deliver food efficiently, sustainably and at scale.

As of January 2026, Route The Meals has been piloted in 15 countries, supporting WFP-owned operations and Government-led safety nets  for more than 15 million people reached    and USD 3 million in cost efficiencies generated.

Across its country-level pilots, Route The Meals has seen a variety of tangible results.
In Haiti, Route The Meals helped optimize the last-mile distribution for WFP’s school meal programme by identifying new warehouse locations and new routes for delivery trucks. In doing so, it decreased the lead time of the meal distribution by 24 percent, reduced the overall travel distance and CO2 emissions by 22 percent and lowered the cost of the operation by USD 373,000.

The support to WFP’s operation in Venezuela spanned two years. During this time, RTM helped select optimal supplier handover points for locally procured food and assign warehouse coverage areas. Thanks to this, WFP averted 97 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions and reduced the logistics cost by USD 260,000.  

Finally in Chad, Route The Meals suggested a re-organization of the mobile storage facilities on the ground to better meet the needs and movements of refugees in the East of the country. Moreover, it identified cost-efficiency opportunities for directly delivering food from main hubs to final destinations avoiding intermediate transshipments. These recommendations have resulted in considerable efficiency gains in terms of transport, handling, and storage costs, with USD 1.45 million  saved throughout 2025.

The Route The Meals project has been supported by WFP’s Innovation Accelerator since 2024, which allowed tests and pilots in diverse contexts and environments. The digital solution is currently being enhanced based on our lessons learned and the business requirements we have gathered from some of WFP’s most complex operations. In collaboration with key partners, we aim to make the solution open source so that it can easily be adopted by UN agencies, NGOs, and governments all over the world.

If you want to contribute to the solution or receive optimization support for your operations, please don’t hesitate to reach out.