FoodALERT app aims to speed food rescue pickups

A store that spots surplus food does not have much time to think. FoodALERT, a proposed app from Northeastern University professor John Lowrey, is built around that narrow window: photograph the product, attach line-item details and alert a nearby food bank or pantry before the chance disappears.

Lowrey is an assistant professor of Supply Chain & Information Management and Health Sciences at Northeastern. The university says his research spans food waste, food donations, retail operations and preventative healthcare, and that he has worked with several large Feeding America member food banks on procurement and distribution projects. FoodALERT extends that logistics mindset to the moment when inventory changes faster than a standing pickup route can keep up.

That is the same operational problem A Simple Gesture runs into in Guilford County, North Carolina. The group says it has made donating food easy since 2015 and that its Food Recovery Program rescues edible food from businesses and delivers it to local nonprofits. Volunteers need only a smartphone, a clean personal car and the ability to lift 20-pound boxes for weekday pickups and deliveries, which shows how much the system depends on speed, simplicity and quick handoffs. In practice, a rescue can hinge on whether a coordinator reaches a driver through a text chain, a spreadsheet or a phone call before the surplus is gone.

FoodALERT also arrives in a field that already has a working model at scale. Feeding America launched MealConnect in 2014 and says it had facilitated 3 billion pounds of rescued food by September 2021, 5 billion pounds by 2022 and more than 7 billion pounds by 2026. The network says it rescued 4.1 billion pounds in fiscal 2024 and 4.3 billion pounds in fiscal 2025. Food Rescue US says its app is central to its volunteer-based food recovery model, underscoring how app-driven coordination has become standard practice in the sector.

For A Simple Gesture, which also uses SHARE school refrigerators to redistribute unopened, unwrapped food from school nutrition programs, the lesson is less about novelty than friction. USDA says donating wholesome food diverts waste from landfills and helps stock food banks, soup kitchens, pantries and shelters, while Feeding America says 29% of all food goes unsold or uneaten in the United States and 94 billion pounds are wasted each year. If a tool like FoodALERT can shorten the gap between a store's surplus and a volunteer's arrival, more of that food could reach neighborhood nonprofits instead of being lost to the clock.