Community kitchens, school meals, nutrition treatment, farmer collectives, seed programmes, agroecology and food recovery work across different chains. Start with your operating model and connect procurement, delivery, quality and outcomes only where your team can act.
| GPS Hebbal | 412 | 22 meal days |
| GPS Hebbal (2) | 398 | which one?? |
Five places, one farmer. Nobody can see her season is slipping.
Many organisations combine two or three. Start with the closest match, then borrow only the parts that solve a real programme problem.
Teams procure, cook and distribute safe meals to people or institutions.
Food is prepared or supplied to schools on a daily calendar.
Children, pregnant women or other groups receive screening and nutrition support.
Farmers aggregate production, services and sales through groups or market linkages.
Programmes support inputs, practices, biodiversity, animals and resilient production.
Surplus food is assessed, collected and delivered before it becomes unsafe.
Not sure which one you are? Bring one tracker and describe a normal week. The model usually becomes clear quickly.
These come up in almost every first conversation we have with food systems teams.
"Delivery was marked done when the van left."
The school says the dal came cold at 1pm. There's no record to settle it.
"The subsidy file sat at the district office for four months. The farmer thought we'd forgotten her."
Documents are in one folder, submissions in a sheet, and follow-ups in a field officer's head. Nobody sees which files are stuck.
"The seed reached the villages two weeks after the rains."
Enrolment closed late, orders missed the supplier cutoff, and farmers lost the planting window.
"Repayment is 94% and I still can't say if income went up."
Nobody tracked whether farmers sold their harvest early, at low prices, to pay us back.
We haven't published a farm programme case study yet. The pieces are ones we've built: applications tracked until the benefit arrives (Tapasya), approvals from regional teams down to each centre (TRRAIN), and ten tools connected into one system (The/Nudge).
A master list of government schemes and their eligibility rules matches each family to the right ones, and each application is tracked until the benefit arrives. Live in four months.
Read the case study →TRRAIN10,000+trainees a yearPankh (persons with disability) and TRRAIN Her (women) run in one system, from regional teams down to each trainee, with centre and placement approvals and automatic certificates. Live in four months.
Read the case study →The/Nudge Institute10+tools connected into one recordFuture Perfect runs admissions, payments and refunds, the learning platform, Zoom and WhatsApp through one system, with screens for trainers, telecallers and verifiers.
Read the case study →Recognise your programme? Tell us where the work gets stuck and we'll suggest a useful first version.
This is one operating model, not a template for every food & nutrition organisation. Use it to see how everyday work, follow-up and management decisions can connect.
Stage 01 · Enrol and plan
Enrolment runs on a hard calendar. Get a farm size or a school roll wrong here and every order, route and target downstream inherits it.
| ID | Enrolled | Type · Size | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| EN-3115 | Mulbagal group 6 | 9 farmers · 12 acres | No leader |
| EN-3108 | Kolar group 14 | 11 farmers · 19 acres | Orders pending |
| EN-4012 | Anand Nagar food bank | Agency · 300 households | Hygiene check due |
| EN-2207 | GPS Hebbal | School · 412 pupils | Confirmed |
Stage 02 · Inputs and support
Seed on credit, a subsidy file at the horticulture office, a drip kit waiting on a sanction. If any of it lands two weeks late, the season's gone. The record shows which farmer is waiting on what, and at which desk.
| ID | Farmer | Waiting on | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| EN-3121 | Lakshmamma K. | Subsidy file · 45 days | Office visit Thu |
| EN-3144 | Venkatesh R. | Loan disbursal | Bank query |
| EN-3130 | Shobha N. | Seed lot SD-019 | Delivered |
| EN-3152 | Manjunath P. | Drip kit install | Installer Mon |
Stage 03 · Through the season
A missed training, late planting, a pest nobody reported. Advice lands best when it's timed to the crop stage, and field visits should go where the season is going wrong.
| ID | Farmer | Crop · Stage | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| EN-3121 | Lakshmamma K. | Tomato · flowering | On track |
| EN-3108 | Kolar group 14 | Ragi · tillering | Late planting |
| EN-3160 | Sunitha M. | Capsicum · fruiting | Pest photo |
| EN-3115 | Mulbagal group 6 | Ragi · sowing | No update 21 days |
Stage 04 · Measure what changed
For farmers it's yield, repayment and income across the season. For feeding it's attendance and food security. Both need measurement planned from the day of enrolment.
| Group | Package | Yield change | Next season |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mulbagal group 6 | Ragi + fertiliser | -8% | Check seed batch |
| Kolar group 9 | Groundnut | +12% | Early sales high |
| Kolar group 14 | Ragi + fertiliser | +27% | Scale |
| Bangarpet group 3 | Ragi + training | +31% | Scale |
Follow one illustrative farmer, Lakshmamma, from her first call to her third harvest.
Illustrative. Timelines vary by crop, scheme and state.
Choose modules for the part of the food system you influence. A kitchen should not collect farm-level detail it cannot use, and a farmer programme should not claim nutrition outcomes without evidence.
Plan demand, recipes, production, temperatures, portions, cost and wastage.
Track suppliers, lots, stock, expiry, dispatch, receipt and cold-chain problems.
Connect menus, school calendars, deliveries, receipt, attendance and feedback.
Support quality measurement, classification, plans, supplies, referral and recovery.
Follow plots, services, practices, production, aggregation, orders and payments.
Coordinate surplus offers, suitability, traceability, pickup and timely redistribution.
Most AI projects stall because the records underneath are messy. So we work in a fixed order.
Every field has to earn its place by helping someone decide something. If nobody uses it, we don't collect it.
A system people avoid is worse than a spreadsheet. We design around shared phones, patchy signal and WhatsApp.
On clean, connected records, AI can read paperwork, draft reports and flag who needs attention. A person always checks.
Where you start depends on where you are. If your records are already in good shape, we can move to AI quickly. If they're in notebooks, we start there, and we don't start from zero.
Offline forms, local languages, links to government IDs and AI features are set up to suit each programme's needs and consent rules, so not every build includes all of them.
We picked the jobs that save food systems teams the most hours. Each starts with a problem we hear often, and each keeps a person in charge of the decision. How we think about AI →
“Our field staff spend the whole visit filling forms instead of talking to the farmer.”
Your team still decides: The field officer confirms land size, water source and package with the farmer.
“Subsidy files come back for one missing paper and the farmer loses a season.”
Your team still decides: The coordinator checks every flag against the originals before submitting.
“Our agronomists can't call every farmer every week, and the advice has to reach the ones who don't read.”
Your team still decides: An agronomist listens to each one before it's sent.
“We hear about a failed crop when the farmer stops answering.”
Your team still decides: Field officers use the flags to plan support visits. No automated messages chase repayment.
“Some districts get three good crops a year and some get one, and we can't say why.”
Your team still decides: The programme director goes through it with field managers before changing any package.
“Every funder wants a different season report from the same numbers.”
Your team still decides: Your M&E lead checks every figure and the baseline it's compared with.
Food, credit and children's health are on the line. These lines don't move, whoever's asking.
Every farmer's package and loan on one screen, then deliveries and market prices by SMS.
Headcount by school, meals planned against cooked, waste per batch and what schools said.
Farmers who missed training, orders pending and repayments behind, by group.
Yield, repayment and food security by district and package, against baseline.
Meals delivered on time, attendance on meal days, and yield and income change, season by season.
A 94% repayment rate can hide farmers who sold their harvest early, at low prices, to pay back. We report repayment next to early sales and net farm income.
Funders notice. It's the kind of honesty that gets you renewed.Most systems launch in three to four months. The timeline moves with the number of programmes and roles, how messy the old data is, and how many tools need connecting.
Tell us where the work gets stuck today. Spreadsheets, notebooks, WhatsApp groups, all of it.
You show us how the programme runs. We'll tell you straight if you need a new system, a better workflow or nothing at all.
We map how your programme works, talk to the people who'll use it, review the tools you use today and hand you a System Blueprint, a clear plan of what we'll build.
Working screens every 2 to 4 weeks, tested by your field team in your own terms. We clean up your old spreadsheets and move them across.
Field training and launch, then 30 to 60 days of close support. After that, the system keeps changing as your programmes do.
We connect to your call-centre system or farmer app, subsidy portal exports, UPI repayment feeds, WhatsApp and IVRS advisory, and PM POSHAN returns for feeding programmes, rather than replacing what already works. Zoho licences sit in your organisation's name, and everything exports whenever you want it.
The questions your finance head and IT lead will ask, answered before the call.
Zoho licences are bought in your organisation's name and hosted in the Zoho data centre region you choose, including India. We work inside your account.
Every record exports to Excel or CSV whenever you want, including the day you stop working with us. You're not locked in to us for support either.
Each person sees only the records their role needs. Land records and bank details are visible only to the staff who process subsidy and loan files.
Edits are logged with who made them and when, so an audit or a funder query doesn't start from memory.
Consent is recorded for each purpose, and we agree up front how long data is kept and when it's deleted. ZolaShield, our DPDP platform, shows where you stand.
AI features run on your records under your account's controls. Beneficiary records never go into public AI tools.
We’ll map what your team does now, identify the smallest useful first version and show where follow-up, learning and reporting can share the same information, without forcing your programme into a generic template.
If budget is tight, ask about the Built for Impact Programme, which gives eligible nonprofits free Zoho credits.
The same approach, shaped to each kind of work.
