The devastating COVID-19 pandemic exposed some of society’s most precarious fault lines, like in our healthcare systems, supply chains, and social support systems. People who once felt secure – those with stable jobs, access to food, and reliable safety nets – suddenly faced the harsh reality of vulnerability.
Once perceived as a distant issue, food insecurity became a lived experience for millions as economic instability, layoffs, and shortages spiraled out of control. Even in the most affluent countries, the cracks became visible. In March 2020, a former refugee, Amine Diare-Conde, watched as social service agencies and food banks in his adoptive country of Switzerland were shuttered, risking enormous food waste and adding to the 745,000 people already living below the poverty line in one of the world’s most prosperous nations.
Meanwhile, an unprecedented lockdown created drastic shifts in consumer demand, and surplus food and other necessities accumulated in warehouses while families went hungry, amplifying another existing crisis: food waste. Millions of tons of food are lost annually in Switzerland alone, and food waste worldwide accounts for a quarter of the environmental impact of the entire food system.
As the pandemic wore on, Diare-Conde saw an opportunity to tackle two urgent challenges simultaneously – feeding people in need and reducing food waste. He founded Essen für Alle (EfA), an entirely volunteer-run non-governmental organization (NGO) dedicated to eradicating hunger in Switzerland by redistributing surplus food to anyone who needs it. Essen für Alle means “food for all.”
The Right Partners, Across Generations, at the Right Time
Diare-Conde found an unlikely IT lead in then-thirteen-year-old Matthias Beeler, who coded the software that got EfA up and running, collecting and distributing food at its first location in Zurich. As the organization continued to grow, Beeler’s heroic, homegrown solution was struggling to keep up with increasingly complex logistics – coordinating the shifts of hundreds of volunteer workers, tracking the intake and distribution of thousands of pounds of food and other supplies, and keeping secure records – especially, Diare-Conde explained, since EfA’s IT lead was often otherwise occupied with school and homework.
EfA needed a secure, scalable, user-friendly solution that would help maximize the organization’s resources and supplies and, therefore, impact. Enter Keywan Nadjmabadi, who brought Diare-Conde a possible solution: perhaps Nadjmabadi’s employer could sponsor the organization’s new software and build EfA a cloud-based technology foundation. Nadjmabadi’s employer? SAP Switzerland. Diare-Conde was quickly convinced. SAP jumped on board, and within five months EfA’s new software, created using SAP Business Technology Platform (SAP BTP), went live.
Streamlining Aid, Maximizing Reach
In the short time since, EfA’s user-friendly, cloud-based, mobile-optimized solution has streamlined food distribution and volunteer management – enabling the distribution of around 900 tons of food and the management of 10,000 volunteer shifts – while offering 360-degree visibility for planning and oversight and providing advanced analytics to enable further process innovation and optimization.
Of particular importance to EfA’s clients were the new solution’s stringent protocols for safeguarding sensitive personal data. “Many clients come to us asking if we can guarantee that [their] details will be kept securely, and I can say we work with SAP so we have everything we need to guarantee secure data handling,” Diare-Conde said.
By leveraging the SAP BTP AI-enabled business optical character recognition (OCR) capability, new clients experience a seamless registration process with a passport scanner that securely captures their personal information, while returning clients benefit from a smooth and efficient check-in experience.
The scalable, cloud-based SAP BTP solution that runs on a database as a service means that EfA’s technology solutions can quickly and efficiently evolve with the organization. “We are constantly working on enhancements and improvements to the existing solution,” Nadjmabadi said. SAP BTP was instrumental in integrating and connecting the entire EfA landscape.
For now, every Saturday, volunteers from a database that has grown to 1,000 members distribute 20 tons of food to 2,000 people at up to five locations across Switzerland. And, Beeler explained, EfA’s impact is even more significant than these numbers suggest because some recipients are collecting food for an entire family, meaning that the organization’s dedicated volunteers serve as many as 10,000 people each week.
A Beacon of Hope
Unfortunately, demand for EfA’s services will only be increasing. In 2023, 30,223 refugees applied for asylum in Switzerland, up 20% from 2022. Diare-Conde plans to keep pace: “We will cover almost all of Switzerland soon.” And the NGO isn’t stopping there – the organization is currently exploring a partnership with a prominent German food bank.
But given that food waste is estimated to account for 8% to 10% of global greenhouse gases, EfA’s impact is already reverberating beyond Switzerland’s borders by directing thousands of tons of food that might otherwise be wasted onto the plates of people in need and by blazing a bold trail that others may follow.
Technology Serving People
The human side of technology is about ensuring that technology serves people, not vice versa. Known for his thought leadership in intelligent automation and digital transformation, Pascal Bornet said: “It’s about designing and implementing technology with empathy, understanding how it impacts individuals and society. Doing so enables a future where innovation benefits everyone – ethically, inclusively, and sustainably.”
The Full Episode
Learn more about how Essen für Alle is feeding Switzerland and tackling food waste by the ton:
- Thought leadership podcast: Essen für Alle IT Leads Beeler and Nadjmabadi and AI and Automation Expert Bornet sat down with Thulium CEO Tamara McCleary to discuss how technology can be of service to humanity.
- Practitioners’ video: Diare-Conde, founder of Essen für Alle, shares how a talented teen equipped with tenacity and technology created a solution that reduces food insecurity and waste at the same time.
Explore more success stories of customers leveraging SAP BTP to solve a problem innovatively:
- Brigada Carcarae: Through geo-referencing and image records, Brigada Carcarae modernized its operations and work with real-time data for monitoring and analysis. Learn how SAP helped Brigada Carcarae achieve its goals of preventing forest fires, salvaging and reestablishing apiaries, and reviving and replanting forests.
- Canton of Zurich: Learn how the Canton of Zurich expedited compensation processing and payments during COVID-19 using SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation.
For the full Essen für Alle episode and the on-demand Better Together: Customer Conversations series, visit sap.com/btp.
Timo Elliott is VP and global innovation advocate for SAP BTP at SAP.