The million-dollar tech idea New York-based New Zealander Galen King gave away

Galen King founded the idea and concept of the Foodbank Project. Photo / Supplied

Manhattan-based New Zealander Galen King built a platform to make it easy to donate food to families in need. Six months later he gave it to the Salvation Army.

In 2015 King founded the Foodbank Project, an online shop that allows consumers to donate groceries to Kiwis in need, in partnership with Countdown. He said he built the concept and an early version of the website in just two days.

Fast-forward four years and the platform has surpassed $1 million in donations and provided more than 30,000 food parcels and essentials items to New Zealanders in some of the country's neediest regions.

California-born King, who moved to New Zealand at 12 years old and spent 22 years in this country before making the move to New York with his young family in 2016, got the idea for The Food Bank Project from his wife Nicole, after she read the book Grace Changes Everything by American author Tim Keller.

"Whenever we went grocery shopping we'd take extra things like baked beans and Weetbix through checkouts and put them in the food bins," says King, who had doubts about how useful this was for charities and donor organisations, as he did not know what items were needed.

"I started thinking this was perfect for an online platform where we could actually show the demand, show what people are buying and potentially increase the requests," said King, who runs the Nelson-based digital agency Lucid. The agency has half its staff in New York and half in this country.

Using the tools he uses every day, King decided to build an e-commerce site on Shopify for food banks.

"I made the logo and built the website in a couple of evenings and populated it with products off Countdown's website as placeholders. My intention right at the very start was to run this by myself as an evening side project for fun to see what happened."

He did that for a while but, not knowing who to send the food to, he emailed foodbanks he had found online. The Salvation Army was the only one that responded.

"They responded with considerably more enthusiasm than I expected, especially from a large organisation ... the pieces just fell into place and we ended up building a v2 of the prototype with integration in Countdown, and we built a full blown, full scale prototype."

King started working on the second prototype in September 2015 and six months later the platform was rolled out in early 2016. Today's Food Bank Project branding is almost identical to what King created in those initial two evenings.

He built the concept around wanting to enable 100 per cent of a donation to go to the foodbank, and not just a percentage, as is the case with many charities which take a cut for administration, maintenance and marketing purposes.

He designed it to be a "self sustaining" platform that would have its own operating budget, by being able to buy food at below retail prices once it is big enough.

Anita Dadzie, administration assistant at Salvation Army. Photo / Supplied

Within three months of working with the Salvation Army on the platform, King realised he would not be able to invest the time and attention it needed, so he donated it to the Salvation Army after six month of work.

"I could see that it had huge potential and I didn't have the capacity at the time to take it to where I saw it could go," says King.

"I just did not have the capacity to do what I knew it would take, which was email campaigns, marketing, social media, that authentic story telling that is so critical to the success of an e-commerce brand."

King's company Lucid has since stayed on as the Foodbank Project's development partner and does its updates and other work as needed. The Salvation Army has 69 foodbanks it donates to throughout the country, and 13 of those are services by The Foodbank Project.

The Foodbank Project donates to foodbanks in Auckland, Hamilton, Gisborne, Porirua, Christchurch, New Plymouth, Nelson and Lower Hutt.

Countdown has made more than 1600 deliveries to foodbank hubs around New Zealand since it launched.

It is serving a much bigger need than any of us imagined.

Jono Bell, head of community ministries for the Salvation Army, says The Foodbank Project has taken the pressure off its resources and it has been able to help thousands of Kiwis as a result.

"I've seen first-hand how stressful it is when foodbank shelves are empty," Bell says. "It's reassuring to know what we have coming in each week through The Foodbank Project and means we can put our focus on other specific items that we need to source."

King, who also runs the co-working space Bridge Street Collective in Nelson, says he can't believe the platform has surpassed $1m in donations and is helping so many people: "It is serving a much bigger need than any of us imagined."

King would like to see the platform expand overseas, potentially in Australia and in the United States, although it won't be as easy there as the Salvation Army is not run by one organisation in the States.

"It definitely is the kind of thing that would scale really easily," he says.

The funny thing, he says, is that it took nothing new to build the platform and to run it as business as usual for both the Salvation Army, and Countdown, which does the deliveries.

"The thing with foodbanks in New Zealand is the problem doesn't go away once you feed people once - the problem is huge - and so technology can be used to solve this."

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