People who are new to the charitable food system often experience a fundamental problem when they try to access it – they don’t know where to go for help. A neighborhood might be populated with pantries, but these often operate out of basements or side doors, with little to no…
Posts published in “Food Pantries”
Wheel a cart around any grocery store in a large metropolitan area these days, and you’ll run into workers who are shopping on behalf of people who’ve placed orders from home. These digital sales make up just 11.2% of the U.S. grocery market, but rapid adoption is expected to nearly…
Before the pandemic, Laguna Food Pantry in Calif., distributed food through a “charming” grocery-store-style pantry where clients could pick and choose the food they wanted, said Executive Director Anne Belyea. Then the pandemic hit, and it adopted the approach of many pantries in switching to a drive-through distribution with pre-packaged…
Aristotle Mannan’s job as a community health worker in Boston for two years led him to two observations and ultimately, a new model of providing food pantry software that helps to connect food pantry clients with healthcare services. His first observation was the extensive use of inefficient pen-and-paper record keeping…
Blue Ridge Area Food Bank has joined a host of food banks that have dropped fees typically imposed upon pantries. Billed as shipping and handling fees or (more confusingly) as shared maintenance fees, the modest charges help to defray the costs of storing and transporting donated food. Many food banks…
The healthy food pantry that Capital Area Food Bank is helping to run at Children’s National Hospital in D.C. is a good example of the type of evolution happening throughout the nation’s food pantry networks. The pantry, open to young patients with diabetes, aims to eliminate barriers to accessing healthy…
When Open Cupboard in Minnesota opened the doors of its new grocery-store style food pantry last year, the team planned to serve no more than 100 shoppers a day. Instead, they were quickly “drinking from the fire hose trying to keep up,” Executive Director Jessica Francis recalled. They opened a…
More food pantries are finding reasons to love online ordering. Online ordering systems empower clients to choose their food in a high-tech format, just as they would through Instacart, giving them a more dignified and convenient way to access charitable food. It’s a big step up from more traditional “grab-and-go”…
A color-coded map is helping food pantries across the nation get the food aid they need when they need it. Souper Bowl of Caring launched the Tackle Hunger Map at the beginning of the pandemic as a way to show the “real-time need” of food charities across the United States.…