Mid-Ohio Food Collective credits Claude with cutting feature delivery to 24–36 hours

Software changes that once took months are reaching food banks in little more than a day, according to Mid-Ohio Food Collective. In a new Anthropic case study, the nonprofit says Claude-assisted development has cut FreshTrak feature delivery from two to three months to 24–36 hours, while halving partner onboarding and training time.

FreshTrak operates at about 2,500 pantries, soup kitchens, shelters and food banks nationwide, serving an average of 35,000 families daily. The figures and time savings are customer-reported results published by the tool’s supplier, not an independent benchmark.

Taking FreshTrak to another food bank was not simply a matter of installing the same software. Each state brought different eligibility rules, reporting formats and consent language. The team had adapted those requirements by hand, making expansion a recurring development job.

The turning point, the organization says, came when Claude Code received the full FreshTrak codebase alongside a new state’s regulations. It produced a working, tested implementation that fit the existing software. Engineers and local program staff still interpret requirements, check every implemented rule against state guidance and approve the work before release.

The Food Collective attributes the onboarding improvement to state-specific adaptation that once required months of manual work now taking days. Several additional food banks are being onboarded.

Engineers brief Claude Tag through Slack, where it works through the codebase and opens a pull request—a proposed code change—for review. They use Claude Code for deeper work, including restructuring older code and changes spanning multiple services.

Before code can merge

• A human engineer must approve the change.
• Automated tests must pass.
• The pull request must receive at least one round of Claude-assisted code review.

Contributors now include staff outside engineering. Software engineering director Mark Mollenkopf describes a technical support employee who received phone guidance on her first task. Her proposed code change arrived through Slack and reached production the next day.

Previously centered on pantry-side check-in, FreshTrak is expanding into a mobile app described as launching this fall. Families will be able to find open pantries, create a profile once and reserve visits at participating locations. The team used Claude to build those user-facing steps and the software connections behind them.