Yesterday an article came out from CRN.com titled
My first reaction was ‘Satya praises RedBit’? Then I read the article and he was also ‘fascinated’ by what we did!
Imagine, I was having dinner with my family, while reading that the CEO of Microsoft, the leader of a $2T company was fascinated by what we at RedBit, a 20 person company, was able to do with technology! As a long time Microsoft technology user, a 15 year Microsoft MVP imagine the feeling when the CEO of Microsoft calls out the work your team at RedBit is doing!
Microsoft CEO Fascinated?
So what was Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft fascinated about? To quote the article
“They went around and essentially created a system of connecting all of the food, solving the hard challenge in the pandemic: How can they scale a nationwide effort around food security?” Nadella said. “That was fascinating.”
This is the work we do with Second Harvest and the Food Rescue platform. The work that won RedBit the first ever Microsoft Partner of the Year for Community Response and finalist for Social Impact at a global level. At a country level in Canada we won Social Impact Award with Microsoft Canada.
Satya even presented our award for Partner of the Year. Even though it was virtual I still imagined being on stage!
If you want to read more about the story see Urgent tech overhaul speeds efforts to get surplus food to millions of people who need it.
It's Been Almost a Year, Where are we now?
A lot has happened since the award. To recap here are some of the stats from March 2020:
- Food Rescued: 1,451,262 lbs.
- Meals Provided to Communities: 1,451,065
- Value of Food Rescued: $3,772,769
- Greenhouse Gases Averted: 5,415,500 lbs.
- New Food Business Partners: 1,062
- New Non Profit Partners: 844
As of March 2021 here are some new stats
- Food Rescued: 6,302,343 lbs.
- Meals Provided to Communities: 6,301,487
- Value of Food Rescued: $17,652,228
- Greenhouse Gases Averted: 19,201,909 lbs.
- New Food Business Partners: 1,182
- New Non Profit Partners: 1,475
A 334% increase in the amount of food donated and provided to communities in need!
Did you notice the amount of greenhouse gasses averted? This is a by-product of redirecting food from landfills and into peoples plates! I recommend reading The Avoidable Crisis of Food Waste which is a report done by Second Harvest.
Technology That Works!
So how was this done? First and foremost it was the amazing people at Second Harvest who are driven by the vision of No Waste. No Hunger.
Second, the amazing people at RedBit from PMs to developers to designers who always find a way to do great things and to make the technology fit the people, not the people fit the technology!
We continue to work with Second Harvest and we also recently released the new version of Food Rescue platform and deprecated the legacy version (only about 2 years old). We re-launched mid-March 2021 and one comment was
It went so smooth we forgot to celebrate!
All of this built on top of Dynamics 365, Power Platform and Azure. Custom systems doing what the system needs to do which is help people. Not only help people in need during a pandemic (yes unfortunately we are still in a pandemic) but also help people running and managing the program.
And this is how technology should be. It should be seamless. It should be natural to peoples everyday processes and not get in the way of work. And this is how we build software at RedBit, keeping people in mind because it’s people that make things happen everyday. Technology is a tool to help facilitate what needs to happen.
It was a great way to end the day yesterday and start the day today! I have always agreed with Microsoft’s mission statement which is
To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
Microsoft provides the tools to allow partners like RedBit to deliver digital solutions that impact peoples lives.
Hopefully when the pandemic is under control and somewhat over, the entire RedBit team will have the opportunity to meet Satya ... maybe he or some of his people are reading this and will pencil us in 😊
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