Bankuet: Creating a platform for food banks to access supplies

Bankuet is a tech-for-good startup on a mission to get food banks what they need, when they need it. Over five years as Product Lead at Bankuet I shipped many iterative improvements to our food bank application (foodbank.bankuet.co.uk). v3 - internally named Volumes and Values - was the largest initiative. The goal was to give food banks more control and transparency without increasing finance or ops admin.

Before v3, food banks faced several constraints:

• Lack of pricing visibility – They could not see line prices or request exact quantities. Instead, they set an overall budget and selected none/low/medium/high per line item. Lines were then allocated algorithmically until the budget was roughly met.
• Inefficient budget use – Ambiguity in allocations sometimes led to underspent budgets, leaving resources unused.
• Limited financial insight – No timely, granular breakdown of donations and spending, which restricted their ability to make informed decisions about supply requests or fundraising timing.
• Poor request management – Food banks could not view their full request history or cancel pending requests in-app.

We believed that introducing clearer UX and richer data would:

• Allow food banks to make precise requests, ensuring they reliably receive what they need.
• Reduce admin workload by removing ambiguity in processing requests.
• Minimize underspending by linking requests directly to visible unit and case prices.
• Provide granular, timely financial information (e.g., breakdown of donations by source and time period) to help food banks decide when to request supplies and when to fundraise.

We built a new version of the portal with three core enhancements:

• Place a Request page – Display estimated price per unit and per case, and allow requests by number of cases.
• Insights page – Provide a financial breakdown of incoming and outgoing funds across years and months. A 13-row table (all-time totals plus 12 monthly rows) shows columns for different income and expenditure fields, enabling granular financial analysis.
• Your Requests page – Show full request history and allow cancellation of pending requests.

v3 launched in August 2024, we have since measured the following outcomes:

• Reduced average request processing time from 4 hours to 1 hour (75% reduction). This allowed us to move the Bankuet request deadline from Tuesday to Thursday, giving food banks more time to plan and submit requests for the following week.
• Reduced request budget underspend from an average of 7% to an average of 0% (comparing 3 months pre-launch and post-launch)
• Reduced number of finance and request related food bank queries by 50% (comparing 3 months pre-launch and post-launch)