Cookwala / Humanitarian
Draft profile
From surplus to a plate, safely, with the phones you already have
The Humanitarian Profile is a small, strict data standard for food banks, community kitchens, school-meal and relief programs. Offer, claim, hand over with a temperature check, serve, count. It works by SMS and spreadsheet, with no personal data, no robots and no internet required. Robots and apps can use the same documents later.
The path, end to end
Offer. A store, farm, caterer or kitchen sends what it has: kilograms, storage, temperature, date mark, allergens.
OFFER 36KG YOGURT C 4C UB0511orFARM 120KG TOMATO A BB0411.Claim. A food bank, kitchen or program claims all or part, within a priority tier the program publishes.
CLAIM A7K ALL.Handover with a cold-chain check. At every change of custody a trained person records the temperature and the kilograms accepted or rejected with a reason. A temperature-controlled line without a reading is not recorded; hot food below 60 °C is refused.
HAND A7K 36 T4.6, orHAND A7K 30 REJ 6 PACK T4.6to reject part of it.Kitchen. A community, school, disaster or robot kitchen cooks; a production run can record cooking, hot-holding and cooling temperatures (experimental fleet profile).
Distribution. Meals and people served at a site on a day, as counts only; any count under ten is "fewer than ten".
DIST 410 MEALS 410 PEOPLE 96KG; per-meal nutrients withMENU.Impact. A summary computed from the documents: kilograms rescued, meals, cost per meal, time to claim, safety findings and incidents, each with its method and the number of documents behind it. The nutrition pass rate is self-reported unless nutrients come from linked recipes and portion masses.
The SMS walkthrough
Type the messages a donor and a food bank would send, or press the buttons. The gateway in your browser turns them into the profile's documents, applies the cold-chain checks (missing reading, chilled above 5 °C, hot below 60 °C, a chilled-class item declared ambient), and computes the summary. Nothing is sent anywhere.
Documents (latest first) and the impact summary:
The grammar is implemented in tools/cookwala_ref.py and tested by 24 conformance vectors: a public test with an input and the expected output that an implementation must reproduce. Keywords are English; Arabic-Indic and Western digits are both accepted. The real gateway maps a registered phone number to an organization, never to a person. Offer ids in this walkthrough are OF-001, OF-002…
Four settings, four worked flows
A food bank in Cairo
Phones and spreadsheets (level H0). A supermarket's tomatoes, yogurt and bread; 6 kg rejected for damaged packaging; 380 hot meals at a community kitchen.
Documents and summary →A school-meal program
Whole nuts refused at handover because the program serves children under five; a lunch with 640 mg sodium flagged by the school pack.
Documents and summary →A disaster kitchen
Cooked rice at 49 °C refused in the flow; 650 hot meals with hot-holding and cooling records in a production run; one hot-hold unit below 60 °C caught and the batch reheated.
Documents and summary →A robot kitchen
A farm cooperative's tomatoes by SMS; device steps as Core executions linked from the production run; 900 parcels counted, nobody named.
Documents and summary →All four are illustrative documents written to exercise the schema; no real organization or event is described.
No personal data, by design
- Every party is an organization: a did:web domain, a GS1 location number or a registry id. People appear only as roles ("trained staff").
- Counts, never records: people served by group, any group under ten reported as "fewer than ten".
- Sites are premises or administrative areas, never a household.
- Notes are 280 characters, scanned for phone numbers and ids before storing.
- Retention declared and enforced; optional hash-only audit log; in-country hosting where required.
People are partners in this work, described by role and situation. No faces, no poverty imagery, no saviour language, on this site or in any program material we produce.
Food safety and nutrition rules, reviewable
Four draft rule packs: a reviewable list of food-safety and nutrition rules a program chooses to apply, derived from published guidance derived from public WHO, Codex and Sphere guidance: cold chain, the two-hour rule for cooked food out of temperature control, date marks, allergens (cooling stages and reheating are recorded in a kitchen's production run, not in these packs); sodium, free sugars, fats, fruit and vegetables; care rules for children under five, pregnancy, older adults and immunocompromised people; school-meal patterns; sodium reduction.
Every pack says who reviewed it, by profession. None is reviewed yet; that is the first thing we ask of dietitians and food-safety officers. The two-hour review template · What we never claim
Running a pilot honestly
Before
Hypotheses and thresholds pre-registered; a four-week baseline of current practice; a data-responsibility review against ICRC and OCHA guidance; ethics approval where required; rule packs adapted by the program's food-safety lead.
During
Twelve weeks, at least two sites and five donors, a comparison site where possible; recording time per 100 kg measured; kill criteria: any attributable safety incident, double the recording time, or the partner's request.
After
The summary computed from the documents, an independent evaluator who reads the raw records, and publication whatever the result shows, with a "what went wrong" section. The partner is named only with its written agreement.
The full protocol · The concept note for a first conversation. No pilot has run and none is funded; a program that wants to talk is a partner from the first conversation.
What we don't know yet
- Whether a program rescues more with the profile than with its current method.
- How much recording time the SMS grammar costs a volunteer in practice.
- Whether the rule packs fit national law anywhere; adaptation is the program's.
What went wrong
- Nothing recorded yet: no deployment has happened.
Interoperability
CSV templates carry HXL hashtags; items carry GS1 GTINs and sites carry GLNs or OCHA P-codes; distributions map to DHIS2 aggregates; beneficiary systems are never touched (aggregates only cross). The organizations behind these standards are not partners; their formats are used so that programs' existing tools can read ours. Section 9 of the profile.