Amway and Kids’ Food Basket: Giving Back Using Lean Principles

Lean in Non-Profit Helps Food Bank Pack More Meals For Hungry Kids

The Kids’ Food Basket serves Kent County, Michigan where at least 14 percent of households with children under the age of 18 live in poverty. Unfortunately, many children do not have access to an evening meal leaving them at a nutritional disadvantage.

The food basket had grown to the point where they were considering a move to a larger space. They believed they could do even more if they could find a way to expand without breaking the budget.

Now retired, former Amway executive, Chris Wilson, was a volunteer at the Food Basket. He had worked with TBM at Amway and asked us to pitch in and help the Food Basket improve their processes to gain more from existing resources with the ultimate goal of being able to help even more children.

This is the story of how we helped them to reduce the time spent to pack a meal and enabled a ten-fold improvement over the old meal assembly process.