[ExI] Food Distribution - Was: Universal basic income

[Christian Saucier]

Unsung.org (http://www.unsung.org/) is trying to fix the problem of
distributing food to homeless and hungry people at a local community
level using P2P/sharing economy technology.   If this model became more
widely accepted and utilized by grocery chains, restaurants, and
community members, it could solve much of the hunger problem in the USA.

One of my startup projects is a company called ripe.io. We are targeting
the produce waste and spoilage problems by creating supply-chain
automation tools built on IoT and Blockchain technologies.  We can
monitor the produce quality in real-time, from farm to the kitchen, and
enable automated re-direction of product to different uses based on
current conditions.  For example, tomatoes that were unexpectedly
bruised during transport might not be acceptable to Whole Foods, but a
food processor or a local Italian restaurant might be interested in them
(at a discount) to make tomato sauce.

C.

Adrian Tymes wrote:
> On Jan 17, 2017 2:33 PM, "William Flynn Wallace" <foozler83 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> re Spike's point about giving away food:
>
> Thousands of tons of food, such as peaches, are dumped on the ground to rot
> because they don't meet the association's standards for retail sale.  The
> people you would give them to would not buy fresh peaches anyway, so it
> can't hurt the market.
>
>
> Transporting them from the many distributed fields where they grow, to
> wherever the homeless are, costs a nontrivial amount of money.  (This is on
> top of harvesting the reject produce.)  In fact, transportation is one of
> the larger portions of the cost of food.
>
> (Even if you moved the homeless from city centers to a field, they would
> only be at that one field, so you'd still need to transport from the other
> fields.  There are far more fields than honeless.  This is merely the
> simplest reason why moving the homeless to fields is generally not a viable
> solution.)
>
> A better solution would be to hook those farmers up with food processors
> who will take non-retail-grade peaches to make, for example, peach jam or
> peach pie.
>
>
>
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