Foodbank Victoria uses Qlik to streamline hunger relief efforts

Foodbank Victoria is distributing an impressive 25 million meals a year to provide hunger relief. It also runs a school breakfast program that goes out to about 1,200 schools.

As those numbers continue to grow, Foodbank Victoria has adopted QlikTech International AB’s cloud analytics platform to manage the increasing scale and complexity of its organization. Qlik helps the nonprofit streamline operations and figure out where to deliver food with greater efficiency.

Foodbank Victoria’s Kennie Greagen and Qlik’s Julie Kae talk with theCUBE about their collaboration.

“What we see within the nonprofit sector is an incredible need for technology,” said Julie Kae (pictured, right), vice president of sustainability and social impact, executive director, at Qlik.org. “There’s data in different silos that you want to bring together. You need to do it quickly, you need to make decisions, you need to prioritize. And nonprofits that we work with are doing all of that under a significant amount of time sensitivity.”

Kae and Kennie Greagen (pictured, left), applied research and innovation manager at Foodbank Victoria, spoke with theCUBE’s John Furrier and Bob Laliberte at Qlik Connect, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how Qlik has worked with Foodbank Victoria to manage food distribution and expand outreach. (* Disclosure below.)

How Foodbank Victoria uses technology to address food waste

Foodbank Victoria now bases its purchased stock — about 30% of its total stock — on data analytics and predictive modeling. Overall, it has reduced dropped food waste to 1% by harnessing Qlik’s data analytics to determine when and where food needs to be distributed, according to Greagen.

“We’ve received the food often quite short-dated,” she explained. “Seventy percent of our stock is donated to us from manufacturers, growers, supermarkets, and often it’ll come into the warehouse needing to go straight back out of the warehouse because otherwise it won’t be good for consumption. We use data to understand as well as we can what we’ve got coming in and how quickly we need to move it.”

Foodbank Victoria is in the early stages of developing an automatic solution to handle potential food donors using agentic artificial intelligence. Qlik’s existing tools have already proven helpful for distributing culturally appropriate food to a diverse community.

“One of our biggest values is to provide food relief with dignity,” Greagen said. “We use data from all kinds of external sources, the government, schools, charity partners, and use that to map who the people are that the food is going to so that we can then make sure that our charity partners are able to get the right food.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Qlik Connect:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Qlik Connect. Neither QlikTech International AB, the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE