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Amazon helps Food Bank of Delaware with workflow

Amazon employees paid a visit to the Food Bank of Delaware Tuesday to offer some hands on help – along with advice on streamlining their current workflow.

Amazon workers employ what’s called the kaizen technique: kaizen is a Japanese word that means continuous improvement.

 

And Tuesday, local Amazon workers volunteered both packing food for seniors and offering up some ideas to improve the Food Bank’s efficiency when it comes to packing and storing food.

“So what we do is come in over here and we’re in a position to take a look at every single functional step, identify the waste, go back and look at the wasted movements," said RohanMendonza, Amazon's Middletown site manager.

 

Instead of taping boxes together and then carrying them down to the beginning of the food packing assembly line Tuesday, Mendonza and others suggested moving the boxes to the beginning of the line before putting them together.

Mendonza also demonstrated how his team created inbound and outbound lanes for pallets of food coming in and out of the warehouse.
 

Credit Megan Pauly / Delaware Public Media
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Delaware Public Media
Amazon's Rohan Mendonza demonstrates the effectiveness of the inbound and outbound lanes.

“So essentially what we’ve done over here is by putting this simple, cheap tape on the floor – we’ve created product flow," Mendonza said.

 

These ideas are especially important to the Food Bank of Delaware now, having recently outgrown their Newark facility’s capacity.

 

The Food Bank’s Development Director Larry Haas says sometimes that means having to turn away food, like bananas from the Port of Wilmington. Right now they don't have enough climate-controlled space to store much produce and fruit.

 

So until they can move into a much larger facility next year that'll double their square footage, they're getting creative with the space they have and making do with it for now.

“We’ve used every square inch essentially of this facility here to do what we do," Haas said.

 

In their current facility, it also isn't easy for large trucks to back in to donate goods. Because of that, the Food Bank of Delaware looses donations they'd otherwise receive to other groups.

 

There are big plans for the Food Bank of Delaware's new digs: an expanded culinary workforce development program, much more space for employees and volunteers, and a revamped "shoppers choice" pantry to accommodate individuals walking in off the street in need of food instead of relying on non-profits to distribute food, as is the current practice now. They'll also be able to focus more on the educational aspects of nutrition, something they've had limited capability to do as of yet.

 

Those are just a few of the facility's big changes, and Amazon is excited to pursue more partnership opportunities once they're in that new spot. Mendonza is especially excited about the prospect of the Food Bank of Delaware's ability to increase its production of prepared foods. He thinks there could be possibility for some of that food to be sold and distributed through Amazon’s platform in the future.

 

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