Abstract
The meal delivery service for elderly people, which has been popularized recently in Japan, is what is termed ‘a community-rooted service.’ In order to help the meal delivery service to grow in Japan, it will be effective to devise plans to develop this type of service into a sound business. This study purposes to deal with two subjects. (1) Advantages of the community-rooted meal delivery service, (2) Problems and other issues in its field of service. Six cases in Tokyo were investigated along the line of five operations of food delivery: (1) First contact with the user, (2) Planning a menu, (3) Cooking, (4) Delivery, and (5) Checking the user's welfare. Apart from these basic operations, studies were made on how to expand the human network, to set up the amount of subsidy as well as the service rate, and to establish a delivery center. The community-rooted delivery service has maintained hearty linkage with the elderly people and with the community network, but there exist a number of difficulties such as the user assessment, adequate menus for a variety of illness, adequate time of delivery as well as the number of meals, and necessary measures in emergency. Also included in this report are the financial difficulty and the difficulty of arranging the necessary delivery centers, which calls for the public support both from the community and the government.
