The core of our program is a stigma-free, elevated free grocery-store style food pantry called The Market. The Market offered our clients (who we refer to as customers) the opportunity and dignity to shop for what they desire from a selection of fresh farm produce, grass-fed proteins, and culturally represented ingredients. Our assortment is curated by our on-staff Food Steward, which designs recipes and nutritional education programs. It focuses solely on a medley of food that affords good health and wellness to a population that experiences severe health disparities due to their lack of access to fresh and healthy foods. Access to nutritious foods is compounded by the location of our primary service area, which is classified as a food desert and community of interest by the Tacoma Pierce County Health Department.
Within the first week of the pandemic, our organization realized that we needed a crisis line but had limited resources. With only one staff member and a landline, we quickly found that we could not meet the needs of our community. We immediately started using an app called Avochato, which put our phone line in the cloud and gave us the ability to text our customers. Conversely, they could text us and ask questions any time of the day or night in their native language with the dignity of remaining anonymous. The texting app proved helpful in the first months of the pandemic when many people who spoke languages other than English were having a challenging time accessing resources.
In addition to our in-person shopping experience, we offer unrestricted access for our customers to sign up for home delivery. Our Delivery Program started in March 2020 when our organization realized that in rural areas of East Pierce Count, the lack of public transportation would present critical dilemmas for those facing food insecurity without the ability to get to a food bank. Delivery service catapulted organizational growth, with over a 900% increase, in those served since the onset of the pandemic. We experienced the fastest-growing distribution in Pierce County by July 2020 and continue to have the highest growth in the state.
As an expansion of our delivery program, we aim to remove access barriers with these self-service lockers in rural locations. The lockers will effectively provide nutritional foods for our customers who have difficulty coming to the food bank to shop for food. This innovative solution to reduce access barriers will meet the growing need for food deserts, remote locations, and homeless populations. The lockers would provide a continuous nutritional food source as they are temperature controlled for hot or cold items. Our first locker is expected to be available in the summer of 2022. We anticipate lockers throughout Pierce County at Libraries, Schools, and rural locations.
Our customers can shop online using an inventory management platform to see what fresh and healthy foods we have in stock. They can then pick it up curbside at The Market or one of our many locker locations (in work) most convenient. The online experience optimizes the healthiest inventory for customers to view first, gives nutritional data for each item, and can even be used to filter specifically for dietary needs such as low salt, low sugar, and gluten-free. Our customers that shop within The Market will also use this system for self-checkout, just like at any grocery store, further reducing stigma while providing the organization with nutritional information on their selections. The analytics built into this software will allow our organization to create benchmarks and have live data to help drive our decisions when considering the purchasing needed to maintain the health and wellness of those we serve.