CHA - Children's Hunger Alliance
Using Technology to Combat Childhood Hunger
Project Summary
The Children's Hunger Alliance Challenge:
Children's Hunger Alliance's ("CHA") afterschool and summer meal programs were relying on a highly manual, labor-intensive, and error-prone ordering process using spreadsheets and paper forms. This system was causing delays, inaccuracies, and unnecessary strain on staff, impacting meal delivery and invoicing.
The EDJE Solution:
We built a web-based, user-friendly, scalable meal management platform called SAMS (Summer and Afterschool Meals System) to increase efficiency, reduce potential waste, and ultimately serve more children.
Introduction
Founded in 1970, Children’s Hunger Alliance is a statewide nonprofit organization dedicated to ending childhood hunger. CHA partners with in-home childcare providers, childcare centers, afterschool and summer programs, and schools to ensure that children get the meals and nutrition they need.
Challenge
CHA’s afterschool and summer programs were being managed through a fragmented system of spreadsheets, paper forms, emails, and manual entry across multiple applications. This process required:
- Redundant data entry
- Scanning and emailing documents
- Separate spreadsheets for each step
- Constant cross-checking between teams
- Reliance on staff coordination for accuracy
The process of ordering, tracking, and reporting meals distributed depended heavily on CHA employees—entire departments of people worked on these spreadsheets, often at the same time, and all trying to coordinate with one another. This complicated and inefficient process, combined with communication difficulties, was leading to wasted meals and therefore fewer children served.
The Project Objectives
- Save time and reduce errors by centralizing order entry, tracking, and reporting into a single, user-friendly platform.
- Improve communication and workflow across sites and teams.
- Enable greater transparency and flexibility in food order and inventory management.
- Streamline key processes such as invoice reconciliation and site transitions.
Solution
Leading EDJE worked closely with CHA team members to analyze and develop the most efficient flow of communication and information to reduce mistakes and waste while increasing reporting accuracy.
The result was a comprehensive, web-based meal management platform, Summer and Afterschool Meals System (SAMS). The platform simplifies data entry, tracks vendor orders and food distributed, generates reports, manages contact information, and provides accurate reconciliation between program attendance and distributed meals.
With SAMS, all of CHA’s program-related processes became simple, scalable, and far less time-consuming, freeing staff members up to focus on the most important part of their jobs—providing more meals to more food insecure children.
The Technology Behind the Magic
EDJE used a variety of innovative and proprietary applications*, tools*, and computing services* to create a web-based meal management platform. The resulting solution streamlined CHA’s processes and ultimately enabled the organization to serve more children living in food-insecure households.
To bring the vision to life, we leveraged
Angular v16 with TypeScript / OpenID Connect (OIDC) / Karma / Angular Material / NodeJS / Express / Jasmine / mySQL / Jira & Amp / Bitbucket / multiple AWS tools, including Lambda, Event Bridge, SES, and CloudFormation / Stackmanager (proprietary Leading EDJE tool).
Results
As Children's Hunger Alliance's afterschool and summer meal programs scaled in Fiscal Year (FY) 2025, SAMS helped streamline operations, improve visibility, and save staff time.
FY25 Program Context and Operational Impact:
- Summer and afterschool programs saw a 277% increase in meals served, supported by more efficient ordering, tracking, and reporting
- Automated food order exports saved 2-3 hours weekly on projections and 30-60 minutes daily on vended orders
- Invoicing, delivery tracking, and reconciliation were consolidated into one system, replacing spreadsheets
- Real-time inventory visibility and centralized reporting reduced over-ordering, waste, and manual data entry
By consolidating core meal-program functions into a single platform, SAMS enabled CHA staff to manage large-scale programs more efficiently and accurately.
Let's Talk
SAMS is just one example of how EDJE can help modernize and streamline an outdated and complex process. If your organization could benefit from a logistics and communication platform designed to fulfill your informational and administrative needs, let’s talk.
