Pando Days Update: Rohan Kunchala, CSUF

This is part of an ongoing series of blog posts following up on the real-world, community-based work being initiated through Pando Days. We sat down with Rohan Kunchala from Cal State University, Fullerton (CSUF), one of the team leads for Pando Days 2023 first-place winning project, Bag/Get. We talked about what’s next for his ingenious project – and then touched on related matters, such as food pantries and the importance of sustainability efforts at a local level. 

Pando: Hey Rohan, once again, congratulations on getting first place for your team’s project last season. You and your team truly earned it.

Rohan Kunchala: Thanks. It was a long process but we also were proud of the product we presented.

I wanted to check back in with you to see how your project has progressed, as it was well positioned for taking next steps in development. I know you are already signed up for Pando Days 2024/25, but what else has been going on with Bag/Get since we saw each other last at the Pando Awards?

Well, actually, only a few weeks after the awards, we joined the Larta Institute’s latest cohort for their Venture Fellows program. We were assigned a mentor from their network who has been in the Orange County startup ecosystem for a very long time. 

She and the program have been helping us create plans for the immediate future in the next 6-8 months time frame. They have been helpful in helping us engage with a fundraising strategy and then they also will help us with our pilot program rollout. So, yeah. It’s busy.

Just a reminder to readers that you and your teammates from CSU Fullerton had used the local food pantry at one time or another as students, you saw first-hand and up-close how your engineering and computer science backgrounds could address inefficiencies in getting food delivered from supplier to food bank to food pantry to consumer, and then developed an app to do it – which became the basis for a new technology startup, Bag/Get.  

Of course, all Pando Days projects are designed for real-world implementation. But not too many can seem viable for venture funding. Good for you for the traction you’re starting to get! 

It is slightly challenging because we are dealing with the food bank/pantry ecosystem. It is not the type of product a venture capitalist will throw money at. 

Also, part of the reason why existing software has not really taken off in this space is due to pricing. Many companies try to price their product as if a corporation were paying for it. But, it’s not a corporation. These are small, community pantries or self-started food banks. They cannot afford $300 monthly subscriptions.

So, what do you do then?

Well, we want to price our software sort of in that niche to where it’s profitable and profitable enough to where it can sustain growth of the software itself but not to the point where a pantry manager or a food bank manager looks at it and feels stressed out when the charge hits. We still need to spend serious time figuring out our pricing strategy. But, that is a little further down the line.  

Are you purposefully working with and researching smaller-scale pantries and banks currently? What has your research been like for that?

We make it a heavy emphasis to volunteer where we can. Every individual on the team is beholden to volunteer at two sites per month for a team total of eight sites per month. That’s just an internal target we set for ourselves because we realized that when we don’t go in person for a while, we feel sort of a disconnect.

It is interesting that personal contact is still so important.

I mean, we were users ourselves of the food pantry. That’s how this started. We were and still are very much a part of that ecosystem. That connection reminds us why and for whom we are creating this product. 

I think that we need that sort of presence with the users of the banks/pantries to connect with the users that we are serving. And we need it repetitively. Once does not suffice. 

And the other thing is, like, you feel amazing. Anytime you volunteer and spend time with these people and help them, it just feels so good. 

But, feelings aside, this practice serves a dual purpose. One, you can gauge hands-on how well you are serving. What works best? How do you know this-or-that can work? 

And also, as a team, this frequent hands-on experience serves as the base for our product research. If we see something common that we’ve not yet taken account of, then perhaps we may need to incorporate it into the software.

So, visitation and volunteering is not just a one-and-done matter?

It’s an essential part of development. We tried doing more traditional market research. But, there was a point where we got tired of constant phone calls and emails – which are often not responded to. 

So, we decided just to focus back on our immediate community and people we could actually interact with and talk to face-to-face. And it’s working

This year, it sounds like you are trying to pilot with the intention of scale. 

The local-as-global solution approach to research that we’ve been using works; it is just difficult. 

I think the bigger challenge, though, is that we focus on smaller organizations instead of larger ones. Our product is focused on pantries as opposed to food banks.

Before going on, what’s the difference?   

A food bank essentially is just much larger in scale than a food pantry. Typically, a food supplier sends product to a food bank, then a food bank services local food pantries, with the food pantries actually getting the food to the users – the consumers.  

However, this distinction between food banks and pantries means more than just where they happen to live on the distribution food chain. It relates to resources. Many large food banks, for instance, are better resourced because of their size. They have the resources and tools to make their work more efficient for themselves and their clients. Pantries, on the other hand, are in a much more dire place. 

Pantries often are almost fully volunteer-run with maybe one staff member. They also often have very little money. They need help to optimize their operations on such tight measures. 

So, we really just want to focus on the food pantries for now – that’s where the need really is and where we ourselves can learn the most – and continue to collaborate with food banks when possible. 

This makes me wonder, why is even preserving these local operations truly useful? What value do you see in trying to bolster the local food pantries instead of just furthering the reach of these already efficient, large-scale food bank operations? 

That is a fantastic question, and I am so glad you asked it. Fundamentally speaking, I am not opposed to having only food banks. There are some counties in California, Humboldt County is one of those, where literally one food bank serves the entire county. They do an amazing job. 

But which would you prefer? A system where there is one large food bank serving a big population? Or a system of very many independent food pantries? Or, a mix?  

I very much prefer a system with many small pantries. The reason is quite simple. If food pantries are beholden to a single provider, then, at the end of the day, if anything goes wrong in this relationship there are major ramifications for the pantry and there is nowhere for the pantry to turn. We have seen relationships like this go sour and the problems they cause.

It sounds a lot like the massive corporatization of everything in general. A strong, local community base can get lost which, in turn, can create less long-term viability if the larger entity decides to stop operations for whatever reason. Sound right?

In general, I think, everything needs to be seen through the lens of power. Is a relationship balanced in this regard or not? I think that depending too much on large-scale food banks can disrupt the balance. Because like I said, pantries often don’t have the means for financial self sufficiency. And you never want them to be beholden in that way. 

The other benefit of these small pantries being independent is for distribution reasons. In an ideal world, food would be fresh and go straight from farm to pantry or grocery store without an intermediary stopping point for the food. 

We want everything as fresh as possible, as healthy as possible for as many people as possible. Having a bank store food before later shipping it out delays that process and leads to older food and, at a larger scale, the need for more artificial preservation methods.

Wow. I never thought of that before. So, in many ways, your work on food justice for marginalized populations is actually also looking at food justice for all. Do you see this improving in the future?

Actually, more and more we’re seeing that the biggest role the food bank has to play is to set up the grocery store to pantry relationships. So, the food never even stops at the food bank warehouse. It goes directly from the grocery store to the pantry. 

We want to see way more of that – even to the extent to where the food bank is not even involved. We want the food to be so local and so fresh it is going straight from the grocery store to the pantry where the people are going to get the food. Or, straight even from a local farm to the pantry. And we want the food bank to not have to be involved in those situations. 

We really want a situation where pantries are strong, independent, and working together. Our software helps enable or even create that ecosystem between food pantries to where there’s kind of a network of them and clients are aware about all the pantries around them and they all work together, and so on and so forth.

Truly fascinating. Thank you for your time Rohan. We are very grateful for the work you are doing and are excited to see how your project develops over this Pando Days season.

Thanks.