Hunger is on the rise around the world, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic recession stemming from it. One company that is stepping up to the plate is The Kroger Co., which recently directed its data science arm to map childhood hunger in its hometown of Cincinnati, Ohio.

Kroger’s data group, 84.51°, normally provides the data science and analytics expertise to handle the day-to-day requirements of the supermarket giant, such as product fulfillment and store assortment, as well as designing a new robotized warehouse that apparently will exceed what Amazon has done with its fulfillment centers.

But as COVID-19 closed in earlier this year, the 84.51group (whose name is a reference to the longitude of Kroger headquarters) accepted an invitation from the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and the Cincinnati City Council to help with a pressing problem: identifying the areas in the greater Cincinnati metropolitan where children are likely not getting enough to eat.

Data scientist Charles Hoffman was the point person for the project at 84.51°. Hoffman worked with colleagues at the Cincinnati Children’s to brainstorm different ways of tackling the problem. “What we ended up doing was utilizing publicly available census data and then highlighting our population of concern, which in our case was children in poverty,” Hoffman tells Datanami.

Click here to read full Datanami article.