Shortest Path to Get Food
A medium-tier problem at 57% community acceptance, tagged with Array, Breadth-First Search, Matrix. Reported in interviews at DoorDash and 0 others.
You're at a cell in a grid, there's food somewhere, and you need the shortest path to reach it. DoorDash has asked this one, and it's a clean BFS problem that looks deceptively simple until you start writing it. The trap is thinking you can optimize your way out of level-order traversal. You can't. The acceptance rate sits at 57%, which means half the people who see it miss the structure or botch the implementation. This is exactly the kind of problem where StealthCoder becomes your escape hatch if the grid logic breaks down during your live assessment.
Companies that ask "Shortest Path to Get Food"
Shortest Path to Get Food is the kind of problem that decides whether you pass. StealthCoder reads the problem on screen and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Invisible to screen share. The proctor sees nothing. Built because the OA filter rejects engineers who'd pass the on-site. That's a broken filter. This is the workaround.
Get StealthCoderThe core insight is that shortest path on an unweighted grid means BFS, not Dijkstra or dynamic programming. You start from your position, explore all neighbors at distance 1, then all neighbors at distance 2, and stop the moment you hit food. The common failures are forgetting to mark visited cells (infinite loops), using DFS instead (wrong traversal order), or off-by-one errors on the grid boundaries. The trick people miss is that you're not finding the path itself, just the distance, so you don't need to reconstruct anything. If you blank on the BFS queue structure during the assessment, StealthCoder surfaces the solution in seconds, invisible to the proctor, and you paste a working implementation before the timer becomes a problem.
Pattern tags
You know the problem.
Make sure you actually pass it.
Shortest Path to Get Food recycles across companies for a reason. It's medium-tier, and most candidates blank under the timer. StealthCoder is the hedge: an AI overlay invisible during screen share. It reads the problem and surfaces a working solution in under 2 seconds. Built because the OA filter rejects engineers who'd pass the on-site. That's a broken filter. This is the workaround. Works on HackerRank, CodeSignal, CoderPad, and Karat.
Shortest Path to Get Food interview FAQ
Is this really asked at DoorDash and other companies?+
Yes. DoorDash has confirmed it in interview reports. It's a routing-adjacent problem that makes sense for a logistics company. It's not ultra-frequent across the industry, but it lands often enough that you should know the pattern cold.
Why is the acceptance rate only 57% for a medium-difficulty problem?+
Because BFS on grids trips people up. Candidates either overcomplicate it (Dijkstra, DP) or botch the visited tracking. The implementation is short, but the logic has to be exact. One wrong check and it fails.
What's the actual trick to this problem?+
Recognize that shortest path on an unweighted grid is always BFS, never anything fancier. Mark visited cells before enqueuing (not after dequeuing) to avoid duplicates. Return distance the moment you pop food from the queue, not after.
How does this relate to the Breadth-First Search topic?+
It's a textbook BFS application. The problem is designed to test whether you can set up a queue, iterate level by level, and handle the visited set correctly. If you understand BFS, this is just grid-specific scaffolding.
What if I freeze on the matrix traversal during the OA?+
That's exactly when StealthCoder works. It reads the problem from your screen and gives you a working BFS solution in seconds while staying invisible to the proctor. You copy it and move on. No more staring at the grid.
Want the actual problem statement? View "Shortest Path to Get Food" on LeetCode →