Case Study: Food & Friends achieves efficient, cost‑saving delivery of life‑saving meals with RouteSavvy

Food & Friends Uses the RouteSavvy Route Optimization API To Deliver Life-saving Food, Save Time & Reduce Operating Costs

Food & Friends, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that delivers nutritionally tailored meals and groceries to people with serious illnesses, faced rapidly increasing delivery demands—about 1 million meals a year to ~3,000 clients across 5,300 square miles using 9 vans and hundreds of volunteers. Manual route planning (previously done with Microsoft MapPoint) became unsustainable, so they turned to RouteSavvy and its RouteSavvy Route Optimization API to address nonprofit fleet route optimization at scale.

Food & Friends’ developers integrated the RouteSavvy Route Optimization API into a new operations system that coordinates client diets, meal prep instructions, and optimized routes for staff and volunteer drivers. RouteSavvy’s solution automated routing for vans and volunteers, saving roughly 10 hours per week for office staff (about 520 hours per year), reducing driver time and fuel costs, and improving donor-facing efficiency metrics—helping the organization deliver meals more reliably and stretch donated resources.

Food & Friends

Carrie Stoltzfus

Executive Director