The Pizza for a Purpose app has facilitated the donation of 25,000 slices of pizza to food-insecure families in South Florida, built and launched in 2024 by two siblings from the region. The platform lets anyone use their phone to send fresh pizzas from a nearby restaurant to a nearby charity of their choice, cutting out the friction that has historically made ad hoc food donation difficult.
How the Pizza for a Purpose App Works
The app was designed by Aashrita Kaza, now 13, and her brother Anish, now 14, according to CBS Miami and WPBF. The premise is straightforward: a user opens the app, selects a local restaurant and a local charity, and completes a donation. Restaurants in areas such as Broward County are connected directly to charities serving families who cannot reliably afford fresh food. No complicated logistics, no central warehouse. The pizza goes from kitchen to charity in one transaction.
That simplicity is the point. Food donation schemes often stall on coordination costs: who calls whom, who collects, who delivers. By building the matching layer into software, the Kaza siblings removed those barriers for both donors and recipients.
The idea grew out of their own volunteering. While working at local charities, the siblings encountered adults who struggled to afford fresh meals regularly, but it was seeing food-insecure children that, by their own account, they had not expected to find in 21st-century America. That experience gave the project its momentum.
‘The reaction really warms our hearts,’ Aashrita told CBS News for the Miami Proud segment. ‘Their faces just light up the second they get the pizza. It’s very rewarding because it makes everything we do worth it.’
Beyond Pizza: The Dhanam Foundation
The app is not where the siblings’ work ends. According to The Times of India, Aashrita and Anish have also established the Dhanam Foundation, named after the Sanskrit word ‘dhanam’, which embodies the spirit of compassion and generosity. The foundation broadens the scope of what the pair are attempting: the app is the most visible tool, but the organisation sits behind it as the longer-term vehicle for their work.
Naming a youth-led foundation after a Sanskrit concept of generosity is not branding for its own sake. It signals something about how the siblings frame the work: less as charity in the transactional sense, more as an expression of a value that has a name and a history. Whether that framing helps the foundation grow its reach remains to be tested, but the 25,000-slice figure suggests the operational model is working at scale for a project run by teenagers.
What the Numbers Actually Show
Twenty-five thousand slices is a concrete outcome, and context helps it land properly. Fresh food donation, as distinct from shelf-stable goods, is harder to execute: it spoils, it requires timing, and charities receiving it need to be ready. The Pizza for a Purpose app has managed to make fresh pizza donation repeatable enough to reach that volume since launching in 2024, which is less than two years of operation.
The challenges are real. Volunteer-built platforms depend on the continued engagement of both restaurant partners and donors. Scaling that network beyond Broward County, sustaining restaurant participation, and maintaining the app as the siblings move through school are all pressures that do not disappear once a milestone number is announced. Neither Aashrita nor Anish has suggested the hard part is behind them.
Pizza for a Purpose is available on the Apple App Store. For those in South Florida looking to make a donation through the platform, the next step is there already, built by a 13-year-old and a 14-year-old who decided volunteering was not enough.
