Episode 136: Bondadosa, A New Kind of Food Delivery
About the Podcast
Today we have Maggie Brown, Chief Executive Officer of Bondadosa, a business that partners with nonprofits, for-profits and government agencies, as well as local producers and regional growers, to serve thousands of families in need every week. She’s helped to build a delivery network that allows you to order various items from local producers while supporting those who need access to food and other basic needs.
About Maggie Brown
Maggie Brown, Chief Executive Officer of Bondadosa, a business that partners with nonprofits, for-profits and government agencies, as well as local producers and regional growers, to serve thousands of families in need every week. She’s help to build a delivery network that allows you to order various items from local producers within Bondadosa’s network. They deliver to you, and your delivery fee offsets the cost of fresh food distributions for local families in need throughout the Denver Metro area.
Discussion Takeaways
- Bondadosa’s goal is to change the whole food ecosystem so more people have access to it for health regardless of the barriers, whether it’s income status, living with disability, race or ethnicity, background, cost, etc.
- Maggie, CEO of Bondadosa, was born and raised on the poverty line in rural Michigan. It was during her nutrition-dietetics program that she started to understand the systemic barriers faced by her family and many millions of others in the pursuit of health and happiness.
- Bondadosa found that one of the biggest barriers to accessing fresh, local, healthy food is often be transportation. Bondadosa is a delivery service provider working on the logistics behind transporting local food options to everyone. Sourcing, storing, and fulfilling orders for everyone is their goal.
- Bondadosa is a social impact business, and they act as a solutions integrator for the regional food ecosystem. They’re ensuring that everyone has access to healthful foods. They support partners with logistics, fulfillment, delivery, and technology. The programs they support focus on impacting the lives of our low-income neighbors, especially elders, women, infants & children, and marginalized communities. Many of their delivery recipients are receiving food for free through nonprofit partners.
- Because of their efforts, they delivered the equivalent of more than 10 million meals across their service area just during the pandemic.
- Bondadosa supports other organizations that focus on things like education, self-sufficiency, really all kinds of public health issues. It is through these programs and locations where Bondadosa is able to deliver food to people in-need.
- Their next goal to open an ecommerce market for those on government-supported and other kinds of food assistance for the low income. These programs need modernized. It’s high time and incredibly equitable to open up the conveniences of online meal delivery for everyone.
- Bondadosa has co-developed a pilot program with the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment to explore online ordering and home delivery and to test the hypothesis that they could increase the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) or the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for Women, Infants and Children (WIC) benefit redemption. Many, many thousands of dollars are left "on the table" if families participating in these programs aren't able to redeem their full monthly benefit package. This happens for various reasons, including difficulty to get to the store, specificity of products required for purchase, or unfortunately stigma in the shopping experience.
- That's where Bondadosa comes in, by making it easy for WIC participants to shop online, knowing that items can be filtered to be WIC-eligible, the whole order can be picked and packaged for people and delivered to their door with delivery fees waived! They’re looking forward to opening this up to our Denver Metro Area public health agencies to be our first rollout area. Please, if you're listening to this and interested, contact them or your local WIC clinic to reach out to them so you can be added to our waitlist.
- Another aspect that makes Bondadosa's platform unique is that they get to highlight more of their local and regional farmers, ranchers and producers. As they continue to support innovation with both WIC and SNAP, they look forward to seeing more variety in food item eligibility so that those dollars can go back into the local economy and ecosystem.
#1 tip to improve access to healthy food
- To Maggie, the root of being a mindful consumer is recognizing where your food and goods come from, the systems they support, and the impact on the environment as well as on your mind & body. Bondadosa gets to provide that support at both the micro & macro level.
Each week on the Food Dignity® Podcast, the Food Dignity® Movement’s Clancy Harrison hosts a wide variety of hunger experts and other people making changes on the frontlines. Join us as we dive deep into conversations that will change the way you think about food insecurity.
Listen to our trailer!
Want to learn more about how we might work together?
Fight hidden hunger by becoming a
Food Dignity® Champion and take the HIDDEN HUNGER PLEDGE >