DoorDash, mRelief Pair On Food Stamps For Low-Wage Workers

Startup mRelief, which helps low-income workers access food stamps, is teaming up with food delivery startup DoorDash to offer DoorDash credit to people eligible for food stamps in San Francisco, according to a report in TechCrunch.

Many federal workers are still recovering from the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, and low-wage federal workers like janitors, cooks and security guards were especially affected, and are likely now eligible to receive food stamps.

mRelief launched in 2015 as part of a Silicon Valley accelerator called Y Combinator. It’s helped many people get about $65 million in food stamps.

San Francisco is a city where about one in four people deal with hunger, and $13 billion in food stamps benefits go unclaimed every year in the U.S.

“Our work at mRelief is about bringing the simplicity of technology typically used to provide on-demand services, to things that are critical needs,” mRelief co-founders Rose Afriyie and Genevieve Nielsen said.

Food startup mRelief tries to make it easier for low-income individuals and families to figure out of they qualify for food stamps or not, and other social services as well. Last year, the startup debuted an end-to-end process to aid food stamp enrollment in San Francisco. Now, once people sign up, they can get up to $35 in DoorDash credit.

“The value is that we are also trying to learn how this initiative might positively impact the process of applying for food assistance,” DoorDash Social Impact Manager Sueli Shaw said.

Last month, DoorDash announced that it hired another Uber executive to join its team. This time, it was Ryan Sokol, who is now the company’s vice president of engineering.

The news comes after DoorDash hired Prabir Adarkar, Uber’s former head of strategic finance, as its chief financial officer. Sokol led and scaled Uber Eats from its inception, supervising a team of more than 200 engineers, and serving on the Uber Eats executive leadership team. Previously, he was head of engineering at Voxer and he also worked for Genentech, IBM and smaller technology consultancies.

At DoorDash, Sokol will lead the product, infrastructure and data science teams within the company’s engineering department, reporting to Co-Founder and CEO Tony Xu.