Route Desk

Greater Chicago Table — mobile pantry planning

Week of Mon 21 Sep 2026 Proposal for coordinator sign-off · not dispatched
—stops proposed
—households forecast
—vs 4-week average
—need a human call

What the agent did this morning

It refreshes every public source, checks what other programs already cover, runs the demand model on our own delivery history, and drafts one plan. It stops there — nothing leaves this screen without a coordinator's sign-off.

    Sources it touched

    Feeding America
    Map the Meal Gap 2024
    USDA
    FARA 2019 · SRAM 2025
    USDA
    Food Environment Atlas
    Census
    ACS 5-year, block group
    City of Chicago
    food inspections feed
    211 directory
    86 registered programs
    OpenStreetMap
    illinois-latest.osm.pbf

    Demand forecast

    Households expected at each stop this week. The model learns from our own fifteen-month delivery log; the public indicators tell it which neighbourhoods are moving.

    pantry-demand-ft · v3

    Base model
    Chronos-Bolt small, 48M
    Fine-tuned on
    18,412 stop-weeks, 34 sites
    History
    Jun 2023 – Aug 2026
    Covariates
    FARA tract flags, ACS BG, Atlas
    Last retrain
    31 Aug 2026
    Next retrain
    28 Sep 2026

    Anything the model wants to move more than 35% week over week is held back and sent to sign-off instead of into the plan.

    Accuracy on the last 12 weeks

    9.4households off, on average
    7.8%mean error
    91%of weeks inside the range

    Against the old method

    Same-week-last-year, which is how routes were set before.

    Fine-tuned model 9.4
    Last year's numbers 21.6

    By stop

    Stop4-wk avgForecastRangeChangeWhy

    Proposed route

    Two box trucks, ten stops, Tuesday through Thursday. Stop order is drive-time only — move anything that clashes with a site's own schedule.

    Stock to load

    Built from the forecast at our standard 15.4 lb per household, then checked against truck payload. Adjust in the warehouse sheet after sign-off.

    StopProduceProteinShelf-stableDairyDiapersTotal lbvs last week

    Truck payload

    Coordinator sign-off

    Every stop needs a decision before the plan goes to the warehouse and the volunteer captains. Four stops are marked because the agent would not decide them on its own.

    Ten stops still to review.

    Decision log

    • Nothing logged yet. Run the plan to start the week.

    Data health

    What came down this morning, and what broke. Two things are degraded and the plan says so rather than hiding it.

    FileRowsColsStateNote
    Two degradations carried into this week's plan.
    Drive times are straight-line distance with a 1.32 road factor, because pyosmium is not installed in the worker and the Illinois extract could not be opened. Expect ±8 min per leg.
    Map the Meal Gap is the cached 2024 release; the licensed 2025 file has not been placed in the bucket. County-level gap rates are 14 months old.