Grant: Applied Research and Development Grants - Level 1

Link2Feed provides food banks with software solutions to better manage operations and resources in order to increase their level of accountability and overall community impact. Link2Feed has been serving food banks for over 5 years and currently has 5 full time employees. The core Link2Feed platform is a sophisticated data management software that streamlines and standardizes what can often be a complex client intake process and allows food banks to report on client demographics and usage levels. Competition in this industry is largely fragmented. Existing competitors do not focus solely on fulfilling the needs of this market and are not working toward global scale or integrated suites. Therefore, their offering is not a comprehensive solution and it cannot be scaled to the same extend as Link2Feed's offering. The challenge facing Link2Feed is that to maintain market dominance and to support current/potential customers participation in broader collective impact project, enhancements to the Link2Feed API and successfully commercialized integrations with other systems are required. The proposed project with Lambton College is focused on solving this technical challenge. There have been numerous requests from current customers for Link2Feed to incorporate this functionality as well as large regional and national associations. This technology will change the way food banks participate in collective impact projects in their community and is technology that no direct competitor has built/has known plans for building. The proposed project with Lambton College is critical for future growth, including additional streams of revenue, the foundations for creating a proprietary collective impact platform and eventually a potential spin-off company. The outcomes of this project will be beneficial to our organization as it will help to position us as a leader in our industry and increase our client base. This project will create the groundwork for a secondary company, which will continue to support technical jobs in Southwestern Ontario and develop Canadian owned IP.