Harvest Hope Food Bank Optimizes Its Promotional Strategy to Raise Donations Using Integer Programming

Harvest Hope Food Bank (HHFB), based in South Carolina, serves primarily donated food to people in need in 20 counties across the state. It distributed 28 million pounds of food and fed over two million individuals in fiscal year 2014-15. However, this constituted only 40% of the annual meal gap of about 70 million pounds in its service area. One of its major strategic goals is to efficiently utilize its operating budget, and human and technical resources to increase food and dollar donations raised through events corresponding to various promotional initiatives. We worked with HHFB management and staff to develop resource capacity bills (i.e., consumption of each resource per event), and calculated the expected food and/or dollar donation yield per event. We then developed an integer programming optimization model to determine the optimal number of events of each initiative per year with the objective of maximizing the total annual meals yield (i.e., number of meals that could be served using the food and dollar donations) subject to resource constraints and the allowable number of events of each initiative as advised by HHFB management. With our recommended optimal strategy, HHFB is capable of providing 1.72 million additional meals per year (41% increase) from these promotional events within the existing resource limits, which can help bridge the meal gap in its service area. HHFB has embedded the optimization model in their strategic planning of promotional events, as well as the allocation of resources to support these initiatives, in order to meet their five-year and ten-year meal coverage targets. Additionally, HHFB is disseminating the value of this integrated framework to their peer food banks from the national Feeding America consortium