Route The Meals

In 2023, the UN World Food Programme reached an estimated 150 million people with food, cash and commodity vouchers. To support people in need, WFP uses an extensive and intricate logistics network comprising thousands of delivery sites, warehouses and ports. This operating environment is often disrupted by access constraints, geo-political turmoil and climate-related shocks. Ensuring timely deliveries in such a context is already a challenge by itself, but to meet the increasing humanitarian needs with reduced funding levels, WFP must design these supply chains to be as efficient, resilient and sustainable as possible.

To support these efforts, WFP is launching Route The Meals, an optimization tool that analyses and improves the efficiency of the logistics network and food deliveries in a given country. Route The Meals supports the distribution of general food assistance, school meals or nutritious products, as well as provides technical assistance to local governments and partners. RTM's advanced algorithms will help inform where WFP needs new warehouses and hubs and determine optimal demand coverage and efficient last-mile transport routes.

In 2023, Route The Meals was piloted in 3 countries, reached 2.5 million children and resulted in US$ 373k efficiency gains. 

In Haiti, optimizing the last-mile distribution for WFP’s school meal programme helped identify new warehouse locations and new routes for the trucks to take. These changes reduced the overall travel distance and CO2 emissions by 22 percent while reducing 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.

WFP’s Supply Chain & Delivery Division is now working with Google and the WFP Innovation Accelerator to bring Route The Meals to scale, starting with the 6-month Google Humanitarian Ventures Accelerator (Jan 2024 – June 2024). During the coming months, Route the Meals will be piloted in several countries to streamline the solution and enhance its functionalities.