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Developing a Support Application for Food Pantries (SAFPAS) to Improve Client Access to Healthy Foods & Enhance Emergency Preparedness

NCT05880004 · Status: RECRUITING · Phase: NA · Type: INTERVENTIONAL · Enrollment: 537

Last updated 2025-12-17

No results posted yet for this study

Summary

Food pantries face many challenges, including recruitment and training of staff/volunteers, communications with staff/volunteers and clients, providing client choice, and emergency preparedness. The investigators will develop, implement, and evaluate the Support Application for Food Pantries (SAFPAS), a mobile application to address these concerns under normal and emergency operations, and assess its impact on 20 Baltimore food pantries, and on the healthiness of foods received by 360 food pantry clients using a randomized controlled trial design. If successful, the tested and refined app will support local food assistance programs throughout the United States.

Conditions

  • Improving Healthy Food Access in Food Insecurity Populations in Normal and Emergency Situations

Interventions

BEHAVIORAL

Support Application for Food PAntrieS (SAFPAS) - A mobile app that helps food pantries recruit, train and schedule volunteers, offer choice safely, and provides multilevel communications

The primary intervention is a mobile application (app) which supports food pantries to recruit, train and schedule volunteers; provide a safe, remote form of client choice; and provides a means of sharing real-time status information with clients, pantries, food banks, and emergency operation centers. Following formative work, user centered design, and usability testing, the SAFPAS app will be implemented in three stages, where each stage introduces new features. Pantry clients will be encouraged to download the app and learn its key features at the end of baseline data collection. During the first weeks of each stage, training of participating food pantry directors/staff and Maryland Food Bank (MFB) staff will take place - focusing on use of any new features. Initial training will be follow up by proficiency testing.

Sponsors & Collaborators

  • National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI)

    collaborator NIH

  • Oakland University

    collaborator OTHER

  • Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

    lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

  • Joel Gittlesohn, PhD · Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health

Study Design

Allocation
RANDOMIZED
Purpose
PREVENTION
Masking
NONE
Model
PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age
18 Years
Sex
ALL
Healthy Volunteers
Yes

Timeline & Regulatory

Start
2023-06-14
Primary Completion
2026-11-30
Completion
2026-11-30

Countries

  • United States

Study Locations

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Read the full study record

This page highlights key information. For complete eligibility criteria, study locations, investigator contacts, and the full protocol, visit the original record on ClinicalTrials.gov.

View NCT05880004 on ClinicalTrials.gov