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The stats will be shocking to those who live comfortably inside an Amazon Prime world: One in three families say they have trouble affording enough diapers to change their babies regularly, and the poorest American families often pay double what the richest do to purchase diapers.
“That just struck me as bananas,” said Josh Miller, an entrepreneur and former Facebook employee who joined the White House’s Office of Digital Strategy last year as its director of product management.
Now, the White House has called on some technology companies to help right that inequity.
Jet.com, the e-commerce startup founded by the guy behind Diapers.com, has partnered with diapers brand Cuties to sell low-cost diapers to nonprofits to distribute to low-income families in their communities. The hope is that the partnership will be a sustainable way to make diapers more affordable to parents who don’t have access to online shopping and the subscription discount options that often come with it, and instead have to pay top dollar at local corner stores.
To bring down the price, the two companies decided to eliminate unnecessary graphics from packaging and add more diapers than usual to a box. The diapers will be available to anyone on Jet.com in late April, but nonprofits can apply for special discounted pricing at Jet.com/jetcares right now.
Those discounts will allow them to purchase packs of diapers for between 10 cents and 18 cents per diaper, depending on size. Prices may drop even lower if nonprofits take advantage of the savings tactics at the core of Jet’s model, such as ordering more than one pack at a time or waiving the right to return the goods.
The National Diaper Bank Network estimates that its 280 network diaper banks will order more than 15 million diapers through this partnership in 2016, the White House said.
The White House says this effort should be viewed as a complementary one to President Obama’s request for Congress to approve a budget that includes “a $10 million investment to test effective ways to get diapers to families in need, and document the health gains that result.”
Huggies and The Honest Company will also make large diaper donations to nonprofits this year.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
