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 is 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. Route the Meal's advanced algorithms will help inform where WFP needs new warehouses and hubs and determine optimal demand coverage and efficient last-mile transport routes.

As of July 2024, Route the Meals has been piloted in nine countries.

Its first three pilots reached 2.5 million beneficiaries and resulted in US$373,000 in efficiency gains. The results of these early pilots are extremely exciting, showing huge potential for WFP and governments to improve the setup of their humanitarian supply chain networks. As a result, Route the Meals continues to engage other countries to implement the solution within WFP operations.

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 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 24 percent.

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.

The WFP Route the Meals team is now working with Google and the WFP Innovation Accelerator to bring Route The Meals to scale through the WFP Humanitarian Ventures Accelerator. During the coming months, Route the Meals will be piloted in several countries to streamline the solution and enhance its functionalities.

In 2024, Route the Meals will launch several new operations, including in Ukraine, Burundi, Chad, Colombia and Pakistan.