Food Banks Can’t Go On Like This

Meeting San Diego’s rise in demand has required adaptability. Normally, “rescued” food—items that would otherwise be thrown out as their sell-by date approaches—accounts for 97 percent of Feeding San Diego’s distributions. Until the pandemic, the group was receiving unpurchased food from 204 Starbucks locations every night of the year. Most of those stores are now closed. The organization normally gets excess food from 260 grocery stores too, but consumers have been stocking up enough lately that many shelves are picked clean.

In the first weeks of this crisis, the lack of food from these sources was offset by restaurants, hotels, and catering firms that donated their inventories as the shutdown began. But that was a onetime windfall—and some of it was food packaged in industrial sizes that work well in large commercial kitchens but poorly for parceling out to families. To compensate for the dearth of rescued food, Feeding San Diego is now purchasing wholesale in the same system where grocery stores themselves are accelerating orders. Food banks are also having to pay premium prices. The day we spoke, Hall authorized a $97,000 purchase of chicken and pork.

Facing Hunger Foodbank in West Virginia used to serve about 129,000 people on a typical day. Its executive director, Cynthia D. Kirkhart, witnessed the same sharp rise in demand after her state issued its stay-at-home order. Then the retail donations that the food bank receives from partners such as Walmart and Kroger shrank by roughly 90 percent, and delivery times for purchased food grew from a week to eight or 10 weeks. “Between March 30 and April 8, I placed orders in excess of $487,000 for food, and some of it won’t be arriving until late June, but at least I’ll have a regular influx coming in,” she told me. “My total budget for this year was about $500,000. My reworked budget is going to look more like $1.2 million to $1.5 million, and that’s with an optimistic outlook for what happens with this pandemic and how long we are in recovery.”

Kirkhart could swing that purchase because of reserves built up through frugality and fundraising. Big Sandy Superstore, a furniture retailer, has urged its customers to donate $50 to Facing Hunger to feed a family for a week. On Easter, the Dutch Miller Auto Group sponsored three church services on a local TV station and ran ads during breaks urging food-bank donations. “In an hour, there were 53 new donors,” she said. When food is donated directly, the logistics of sorting and distributing it are not simple, and Kirkhart’s group encourages people to give money when possible. The food bank can give out 7.5 meals per dollar, she said. “I can make $50 become magical with economies of scale.”