Case Study: MEANS achieves nationwide scale and diverts 1M+ pounds of food with Amazon Web Services

MEANS - Customer Case Study

MEANS is a nonprofit founded by Maria Rose Belding and Grant Nelson to match excess food with people in need through a simple online database where donors list items and local food banks claim and pick them up. The team faced urgent reliability and availability challenges — donated food can be someone’s only meal — plus inaccurate public pantry data and the need for a lightweight, easy-to-adopt platform volunteers could manage while scaling rapidly.

MEANS built its system on AWS (using Amazon CloudFront, S3, Mechanical Turk and Amazon Machine Learning) to power a targeted notification algorithm, validate pantry contacts, and scale on demand. The result: operations in 49 states and territories, over one million pounds of food matched in two years, sustained 14% month-over-month user growth for 18 months, and a cost-effective, reliable service run by a small volunteer team.

MEANS

Grant Nelson

Cofounder and CTO