Manna Food Center’s paper-based system for helping people purchase food at local markets is not very sophisticated, but gets points for innovation. Since the pandemic, Silver Spring, Md.-based Manna has been distributing paper vouchers to hundreds of people monthly, who can use them to purchase culturally relevant food at small…
Posts published in “Strategy”
Food banks are starting to throw around their purchasing power. Because of pressure from food banks, some food manufacturers are starting to remove added salt, sugar and fats from their canned and other goods. A side benefit is that more nutritious food is also ending up on the shelves of…
Second Harvest Heartland of Minnesota has had enough. Last year, the nation’s seventh-largest food bank recorded 7.5 million visits to its food pantries, up from 5.5 million the year before, and double the number of 2021. “It’s unsustainable,” said Allison O’Toole, the food bank’s CEO. It’s why the food bank…
Food banks have long said that they’re only as good as their pantry networks, and lately, they’ve been backing up that sentiment with intention. Fueled partly by Covid-era support, food banks have been growing the capacity of their pantries through a wide range of grant-making activities. Now, many are at…
Without input from the community, the renovation of Akron-Canton Regional Food Bank’s main warehouse, unveiled last week, probably would have turned out a little differently. In improving the warehouse, the food bank employed the same strategy it had when it constructed a brand new warehouse in another location in 2021.…
It was a Friday afternoon in late summer when Bryan Wang, the CEO of bosWell Inc., knocked on the door of Better Lives Rhode Island, a Providence-based community organization that supports a food pantry, community meals, and homeless outreach. Wang was cold-calling, trying to find an organization with plenty of…
In contemplating what food banking might look like in five or so years, the CEOs of our Food Bank CEO Roundtable imagined the ways in which food banks might act more like high-tech, consumer-oriented companies – and the ways in which they might not. Food banks and pantries started out…
Offering wraparound social services alongside free food has long been viewed as a desirable practice among food banks and pantries. Now, Greater Cleveland Food Bank has raised the bar on how it can be done. Its Community Resource Center, opened earlier this month, provides permanent space to 15 other nonprofit…
There’s no doubt most food banks are spending more money to purchase food these days, though there are a handful outliers that spend virtually nothing on food. During Covid, almost all food banks began purchasing more food when donated goods were tough to come by, and government funding and donated…