Feeding it Forward

COVID-19 has drastically changed the grocery industry. Feed it Forward, Canada’s first ever pay-what-you-can grocery store and they have been hit with the need to interact safely and contactlessly interact with customers, while still ensuring that their store demographic is actually experiencing food insecurity.

The FIF 20/20 Challenge required applicants to come up with ideas to develop a solution that ensures the store’s demographic is actually experiencing food insecurity.

“Not only did [the Esch program] provide an experiential learning opportunity...but it also provided our company with a strong case study to demonstrate our credibility as a capable, innovative, and creative team.”

Nathan Battersby and his team at IdeaMosaic presented the best solution. They proposed developing a store management software that can manage and record customer visits. Each customer is given a profile and virtual wallet, which will help improve the efficiency and capacity of the FIF store, while also creating a system that will allow for FIF stores to be implemented all over Canada.

The software has since been implemented in one of FIF’s stores and has so far been a great success. 

“It is being used on a daily basis, and has opened membership accounts for over 250 FIF customers, and recorded over 700 transactions since we first implemented it,” Battersby explains. 

Battersby says the Esch 20/20 Challenge allowed IdeaMosaic to showcase their skills and capability. 

“The Esch program provided me with a safe opportunity to further develop my skills and produce a real-world solution,” Battersby says. “Not only did it provide an experiential learning opportunity for the 6 participating students or recent graduates, but it also provided our company with a strong case study to demonstrate our credibility as a capable, innovative, and creative team.”