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 network by optimizing food delivery efficiency. Using advanced algorithms, Route the Meals optimizes storage locations, last-mile transport and demand coverage for food assistance, school meals and nutrition programmes, helping inform where WFP needs to establish new warehouses and hubs for optimal demand coverage and last-mile transport routes.

It 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 December 2024, Route the Meals has been implemented in 11 countries with WFP operations. The first three pilots reached 2.5 million people.

Across its country-level pilots, Route the Meals has seen a variety of positive 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 school meal distribution by 24 percent, reduced the overall travel distance and CO2 emissions by 22 percent and reduced the cost of the operation by US$373,000.

In El Salvador, Route The Meals' routing algorithms were used to optimize delivery routes to thousands of schools, accounting for complex operational restrictions such as the different capacities of each truck in the government’s fleet and the limited accessibility of each school. Thanks to Route The Meals, WFP El Salvador was able to provide logistics recommendations to the government that are expected to reduce their last-mile distribution costs by 36 percent.

 In 2024, in its pilot in Venezuela, it averted 33 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

During its sprint programme with the WFP Innnovation Accelerator, the Route the Meals team was connected with technical experts from organizations like Google to build their capacity in optimization techniques and processes. This valuable relationship has made it possible for continued optimization now and in the future..

In 2025, Route the Meals will launch several new operations.