Bento

For the 50 million at-risk community members in the US who experience food insecurity on a daily basis, their experience is often inconvenient, undignified, bureaucratic and insufficient. Unfortunately, many of the organizations that support them are not equipped to address this issue effectively. How can we expect people to engage or focus on much needed services such as job training, behavioral health, or primary care if they are worried about where their next meal will come from or whether they will be able to feed their children. 

Bento makes it easy for these organizations to not just ensure their community members are getting fed in a nutritious and convenient way (via restaurants and grocery stores) all over text message, but are then able to leverage the same text platform that has established a trusted, engaged relationship with them in order to further engage them in their valuable wrap around services. 

Today, there are over 50 million people in the United States who experience food insecurity and don’t know where their next meal will come from. 

Covid has made it worse

Food insecurity has been a chronic issue and upstream determinant of poor quality of life and healthcare outcomes in our country for decades and has recently been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the most recent research, food insecurity more than doubled in the United States as a result of the economic crisis brought on by the pandemic. 

Existing solutions aren’t keeping up

Many of the existing “feeding solutions”, such as school lunch programs, food banks, food pantries and soup kitchens, were struggling to meet rising demand prior to the pandemic. And despite their best efforts, the rates of food insecurity (pre COVID) only continue to rise, while the nutritional profile the United States continues to get worse. 

“Since the crisis began, food banks have faced a “perfect storm” that includes incredible surges in demand, declines in food donations, fewer available volunteers, and other disruptions to the charitable food assistance system’s operating model.”- Feeding America 

Bento is a software platform that engages a hard to reach, at-risk populations and connects them with convenient and nutritious meals, all through simple text messaging. No apps to download. No websites to log into. No wifi required. 

How we do it: 

We aggregate 50 million at-risk community members, establish favorable unit economics for discounted food pricing (from restaurant and grocery stores), and then deploy Bento software with community organizations who serve at-risk community members. Community organizations use Bento to not just feed the community members that they serve in a hyper cost effective, scalable way, but then also leverage Bento texting capabilities to further engage them in the valuable wrap around services that they provide. 

Bento provides community organizations with the first of its kind data dashboard that shows them in real-time exactly how their populations are engaging and being fed so that they can optimize and target their limited resources to address the greatest need at any given moment. 

Food insecurity in the United States has many faces and exists across a spectrum of severity. The majority of people who experience food insecurity are not homeless. Rather, they tend to be families who are working three, sometimes four jobs, just to try to provide enough for their families to eat.  These are students who live in their car in the parking lots of their community college or bounce from couch to couch. The face of food insecurity is the person standing in line at the unemployment line because the pandemic shut down the restaurant they used to wait tables at. The spectrum of food insecurity is very broad, but the three consistent themes across them are: 1) they experience the daily stress and grind of not knowing when they will be without food and often times use strategies such as "sleeping off their hunger" to mitigate the discomfort, 2) they have limited access to a variety of sources of food, but none create the consistency that they can rely on to remove the stress, and 3) they have access to a mobile phone...that is not being used effectively to address this issue. Food insecurity is a symptom of poverty. How can we expect any of these people to take the next steps in their life required to get themselves out of poverty when they are hungry. 

COVID has exacerbated food insecurity in the US. There are more people than ever who don't know where their next meal is coming from which has a downstream impact on people's quality of life and health outcomes. Since deploying Bento at the onset of the pandemic, we have seen a significant impact on the mental health and overall well-being of those in our program. We believe in a Maslow hierarchy of needs approach to addressing people's most basic unmet needs first. Only once once we're been able to provide consistent, nutritious food, can we focus on their higher level needs. 

We launched Bento in April of 2020 in Houston, Texas with a Boys & Girls Club. Not only has the Boys & Girls Club of Greater Houston expanded their use of Bento, but Bento is now being deployed in 8 cities across the United States with community organizations, municipalities and healthcare systems. To date, Bento has served over 150,000 meals to at-risk community members. These meals have all been curated by the Bento team for convenience and nutrition, and come from nearby restaurants. The money that each organization is spending to eliminate food insecurity for their community is going right back into the economy, creating a sustainable business model for economic community growth. In addition, Bento is now integrating with grocery stores, which will not only expand access and choice for participants, but will also reduce the overall cost of the meals for the organizations deploying Bento in their community. 

The need and opportunity for more effective, scalable solutions to address food insecurity has never been greater. Technology has been leveraged in just about every other industry to make a significant impact on people’s quality of life. 

With 96% of Americans owning a cell phone today (Pew Research), the time is now for us to leverage mobile technology to change the way that underserved populations access nutritional food on a consistent basis. 

Bento leverages existing mobile technology and sms infrastructure to connect people to convenient, nutritious food from restaurants and grocery stores that are geo-proximate to them. The greatest thing about Bento is that when the individual walks in to claim their meal, they are not identified as someone who is low income or food insecure. Bento's backend technology translates the sms text message into a point of sale transaction, as if it was just another online order for the restaurant or grocery store. 

That moment of dignity not only translates into a trusted relationship with Bento, but it extends to other parts of their life, increasing people's self-confidence and self-efficacy required to address other aspects of their life that need greater attention.  

150,000 people today

2 million people in 1 year

10 million people in 5 years

Engagement: 

1) Enrollment rates

2) first meal order rates

3) active engagement (3 orders per week)

4) average meals per day

5) text message interactions per day

6) cost per meal

7) action taken with a partner's service (e.g. primary care visit)

Health Outcomes:

1) nutrition (weight, bmi, cholesterol, A1C)

2) quality of life self-reported surveys

Socio-Economics :

1) costs savings per healthcare partner

2) utilization of public funded social services 

3) income 

We have a team of 8:

CEO

CTO

COO

Product manager

Software engineer

3 program coordinators 

Our team has a unique set of experiences and skill-sets, both professionally and lived. 

Our CEO has a track record of disrupting bureaucratic systems. Named by Fortune Magazine as one of the Top 50 World’s Greatest Leader, a recipient of the Muhammad Ali Humanitarian of the Year Award and listed as one of the world’s most influential creative people by The Creativity 50’s, Mick Ebeling has sparked a movement of pragmatic, inspirational innovation. As a career producer and filmmaker, now co-founder and CEO of Bento, Mick harvests the power of technology and story to change the world. 

Our CTO grew up in a food insecure household as a child and understands first hand the impact that technology for the sake of humanity means. In addition to having scaled early stage startup technology companies, he lives and breathes one of our core values: We work not as if our jobs depend on it, but as if someones only meal does. This drives us every day! 

Our COO has both public and private sector experience that lends itself well to defining and executing against the strategy required for Bento to be successful. Adam began his career at NASA and was later named a Presidential Innovation Fellow where he served in the White House under the Obama Administration. As a Fellow, Adam was responsible for injecting entrepreneurial horsepower into high impact government initiatives and helping to position the federal government as a platform for private sector innovation through the development of unique public/private partnerships and business models. Adam was also a former Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mayo Clinic where he co-founded, operated and invested in early stage healthcare startups aimed at addressing our nation’s healthcare crisis.  

While we have a equal gender representation on our team today, we know that we have work to do in order to bring more leaders into the company that represent the communities that we are serving. We have recently hired Onboard Health, a unique firm that specializes in surfacing diverse candidates that are under-represented in the market. We are excited to move ahead with a few of the candidates for senior roles in the Company. 

While the $10k grant that winners receive makes a big impact for early stage companies, the prize money is not why we are applying. We believe that the problem of food insecurity in our country is a solvable one and access to the MIT Solve network of influential, value-added advisors will be able to accelerate the impact that we are able to have. We believe that with visibility and access to the MIT Solve community, we will be able to establish public/private connections faster that will ultimately enable us to feed more people. We also believe that as we continue to grow the team, we will have access to a wider, more diverse pool of candidates who will be able to help us measure and evaluate the effectiveness of Bento as an intervention for not just improving health outcomes, but driving societal socio-economic impact. 

Building the approach, infrastructure and capabilities to measure the ROI of the Bento intervention on food insecurity is a massive undertaking. This requires a skillset and access to public service data sets that we currently don't have access to. We believe that establishing this foundation and rigor of evaluation will only improve the efficacy of the solution itself while positioning Bento as an evidence based intervention that reduces many preventable, downstream societal unmet needs. 

USDA: integrating Bento into the US Gov Food Assistance programs

US Dept of Ed: Integrating Bento into the school systems for wknds and summer time when students no longer get access to their free/reduced lunch programs.

SocialFinance.org: to support the evaluation and structure of pay for success financial instrument for cities and states to eliminate food insecurity. 

Food insecurity is one of the most pressing human unmet needs in the US today. As mentioned above, food insecurity has only been worse by the pandemic. As a major drive of negative health outcomes, food insecurity is tied to so many downstream costs and negative impact on people's quality of life. RWJF is very invested in the development of solutions that address the social determinants of health. I believe that RWJF would be a great partner for Bento and could connect Bento with many healthcare systems partners that are invested in keeping an at-risk, vulnerable population healthy. 

Refugees often fall through the cracks of many of our country's social services. Ensuring that individuals who are trying to establish themselves and create a life for themselves that enables independence, requires that they not worry about where their next meal will come from. We would use this money to partner with organizations that support refugees as a way to provide this benefit to them as they work towards taking the steps they need to eventually be independent. 

As a telecom company, I would think that Vodafone would be highly motivated to see food insecurity be solved through text messaging. We would want to partner with Vodafone to expand Bento's service internationally and would use the money to create pilots with international partners that serve at-risk women.  

We currently have access to a massive amount of data flowing through our platform. This is data on a population that very little is known about. Bento's data may be the first of its kind real-time data set of food insecurity, in real time in the US. Being able to create predictive models with this data could be beneficial to get out ahead of future unmet needs that an-risk population might have.