Meals on Wheels America has 5,000 independent programs across the United States, with the program in San Francisco being one of the largest in the nation. Founded in 1970, the San Francisco location delivers more than two million meals each year to thousands of homebound seniors through its daily Home-Delivered Meals program and volunteers deliver bags of groceries to 500 seniors every week as part of the Home-Delivered Groceries program, a collaboration between Meals on Wheels San Francisco and the SF- Marin Food Bank.
Meals on Wheels San Francisco will be set to deliver up to 30,000 meals each when the need comes, and according to City data, that need is not far away. As Richard Crocker, Food Safety and Compliance Manager at Meals on Wheels San Francisco, explained, "In 2020, we opened a new, $42 million state-of-the-art industrial kitchen and food distribution center with an eye on increasing our capacity, quality of foods, and variety of offerings in order to keep up with the growing population of food insecure seniors that live in San Francisco."
In order to produce high-quality meals at this capacity, Meals on Wheels has designed large-scale food storage processes and systems that allows for more food products to be safely refrigerated and stored for use. These food products are what the organization’s culinary team draws from in order to design healthy and delicious meals for clients. To reach this lofty goal, Meals on Wheels required an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system that could:
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Provide accurate inventory information, accounting for substitutions in real-time
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Track food costs and expiration dates to minimize food loss
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Enable the flexibility to create new meal combinations
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Provide authorization capabilities
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Seamlessly integrate with the third-party food distributors
Some 4,000 older adults in San Francisco rely on Meals on Wheels daily for their nourishment needs, which is why the ERP systems’ assurance that nothing was falling through the cracks was critical.