Digital freight network provider Convoy is offering to pay the trucking costs for any business in the U.S. wanting to donate a truckload of product to their local food bank, saying the move could help address growing food shortages faced by people nationwide during the Covid-19 crisis.
The need for expanded access to food comes as millions of Americans are suddenly unemployed, placing unprecedented demand on U.S. food banks even as a shortage of supplies threatens their ability to restock. Grocery stores have traditionally been major donors to those food banks through contributions of excess inventory, but those stores are now grappling with panic-buying, empty shelves, and extensive sanitizing tasks, Seattle-based Convoy said.
Convoy’s new program creates a partnership with the nonprofit group Feeding America, which has established a network of centralized food banks and localized soup kitchens and pantries. Participating shippers reach out to Convoy with a full truckload donation and are matched with a food bank or soup kitchen, usually within 40 miles or less of their facility. Convoy then finds, books, and pays a truck driver to deliver the goods to that local food bank.
“In this unprecedented time of crisis, finding innovative ways to immediately help our communities feels more important than ever,” Alex Brewin, a transportation procurement executive for Land O’Lakes Inc., said in a release. Land O’Lakes has donated more than 1,300 cases of macaroni and cheese to the South Michigan Food Bank in Battle Creek, Michigan. "We are pleased to join forces with Convoy to share what resources we have with the people who benefit the greatest. We hope others in a similar position are able to take advantage of this opportunity to make a positive difference.”
The move follows Convoy’s earlier move to team with tire vendor Goodyear to provide discounted roadside assistance and online tire purchases for carriers in its nationwide network. Participants like owner/operators and small fleets can now access discounts on all Goodyear Commercial truck tires and quickly address any tire issues they encounter on the road with FleetHQ roadside assistance available 24/7.
And in other examples of the logistics industry dedicating its assets to the coronavirus fight:
- Life sciences and healthcare supply chain platform provider TraceLink Inc. announced platform upgrades designed to digitalize the pharmaceutical supply chain during the Covid-19 crisis, saying the move will help companies meet unforeseen supply chain challenges and ensure the safe delivery of critical medicines and supplies to their patients. Available on TraceLink’s Opus platform, the new agile solutions tap into TraceLink’s end-to-end network connectivity, data sharing, and multi-party process orchestration, giving companies the visibility and responsiveness needed for their supply chains to thrive in today’s challenging environment, the firm said.
- Supply chain collaboration software provider Inspectorio is offering its facility-level compliance monitoring software Inspectorio Rise for free, including a Covid-19 safe workplace standard that could help retailers, vendors, and factories to enforce social, environmental, and manufacturing standards. According to the Minneapolis-based firm, its platform could facilitate the execution and continuous monitoring of health and safety audits through real time reporting, analytics, and corrective action plans.
- The blockchain-based logistics solutions provider ShipChain has donated a petaflop of computing power to helping researchers find a cure for Covid-19. The donation of resources equalling about one quadrillion calculations per second could aid scientists with Folding@Home, a distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics, including the process of protein folding and the movements of proteins implicated in a variety of diseases, the Los Angeles-based firm said. “Folding@Home is a wonderful decentralized group effort in finding effective treatments for numerous diseases and has recently become even more critical in understanding how we can effectively treat Covid-19, and for that reason we’re proud to contribute to the effort as a technology company,” ShipChain CEO John Monarch said in a release.
To see further coverage of the coronavirus crisis and how it's affecting the logistics industry, check out our Covid-19 landing page. And click here for our compilation of virus-focused websites and resource pages from around the supply chain sector.
Gartner, Inc.