A Saskatoon software developer has created a program aimed at assisting food banks with the difficult task of sorting and tracking their inventory.

Jared Fedorchuk, CEO of Levis Tech, explains that keeping track of the goods at a food bank is much more complicated than doing so at a grocery store.

“If you’re in a grocery store, you’re tracking things by individual SKUs, right? In a food bank, they don’t really have that, because they can get big bins of random assorted stuff.”

This often results in disorganization, misplaced inventory and food wastage. He says his software, titled ‘FoodCopia,’ allows food bank management to easily track the goods they receive in greater detail, sort it into categories, and get a better idea of what’s in their warehouse. It also offers program and donor fund tracking tools.

The software is being utilized by the Saskatoon Food Bank, Wood Buffalo Food Bank in Fort McMurray, and is soon to be launched by Food Banks Alberta.

Dan Edwards with Wood Buffalo Food Bank has been using FoodCopia for nearly one year. He says it’s made a world of difference in his daily operations.

“It was just about inventory management of how much food is coming in versus how much is going out and where it’s going out and giving a cloud-based solution that makes it very easy to access from wherever a person is.”

Edwards says prior to adopting FoodCopia, he was using an Excel spreadsheet to do the job.

“Excel is a great program…but one of its downfalls is when you start sharing and having multiple people access it at the same time, errors can very easily and quickly occur, and you can end up with syncing issues.”

He adds that FoodCopia is relatively inexpensive, and even free for smaller-scale facilities, making it a great choice for food banks everywhere trying to stay on budget.