As federal funding for food assistance becomes increasingly erratic, food banks are turning to food streams they can more readily control.
High on the strategic to-do list for many food banks is to get more food from local grocers, making our recent webinar on “Food Sourcing in a Time of Funding Scarcity” especially timely. We talked with three food banking executives who have decades of experience in the food and grocery business to glean insights on the best ways to navigate the grocery channel to get more food.
The biggest takeaway? Build in-person relationships with the people working in the stores. “If you’re a food banker, you have to get away from that laptop, and you have to get away from that desk, and you have to get into the stores and build the relationships,” said Tom Hong, Creative Food Gatherer at Northern Illinois Food Bank who spent nearly 40 years at Jewel Osco grocery.
Hong makes a point of visiting with a minimum of eight people whenever he goes to a store, a strategy that helps to address the extreme turnover – up to 100% or more annually – that many grocers experience. “I cannot express enough the effect that you have when you go face to face,” he said. “It’s a proven fact that the more you go into the stores, the more product you’re going to get.”
John Nieman, Engagement Manager for Fresh Connect Central at Gleaners Food Bank of Indiana who spent about 30 years in retail grocery, including at Albertsons and Osco Drug, noted that a couple of categories of food have higher waste than others, including produce, frozen and fresh meat, and dairy. “Those are areas you may want to target on your store visits to make sure that you build those relationships,” he said.
Importantly, it’s key for a food bank to position itself as a problem solver highly focused on serving the donor, said Michael Halligan, President and CEO of God’s Pantry Food Bank who spent about 30 years in various supply chain roles, including at PepsiCo and ConAgra Foods. A retailer dealing with excess food waste is not being as productive as it could be, he noted. “The quicker and more efficiently we can provide that service, the lower the risk that that retailer will find an alternate business partner,” Halligan said. “How can we be the most successful way of getting that food out of that back dock?”
The touchpoints with retailers can be extremely simple. Hong hands out pens, which help direct people to his food bank’s website. He also invites himself into staff meetings and early morning huddles. Nieman noted that most receiving desks have a bulletin board where they’re posting information. “Make sure that your information is up there and current, and that somebody at the food bank is reacting to those calls when the grocer reaches out,” he said.
At the same time, new technology coming into the retail recovery landscape has the potential to make food sourcing from grocers more difficult. Kroger’s partnership with the Flashfood app, for example, makes it possible for shoppers to buy food close to its sell-by date at discounted prices, helping to divert food waste from happening in the first place. While such an app is likely to result in reduced food donations, Hong welcomes the development. “We may end up losing 10% to those folks, but the exposure and the education that we get brings the awareness that there is so much food waste out there,” he said. “We all agree that we don’t want the food to go to the landfill.”
Technology is always going to push the food recovery business forward, acknowledged Nieman. Apps like Food Rescue Hero, for example, make it possible for volunteers to identify one-off opportunities to pick up and deliver food to pantries or soup kitchens. Feeding America’s MealConnect program is similarly useful, while helping to track and record pounds of donated food. “Embrace those technologies as much as you can and try to be a part of that,” he said.
Halligan took a long view in assessing potential changes in the supply chain. The next evolution of food sourcing, he said, lies in acquiring food very early in the supply chain, say directly from a farmer, and adding manufacturing capabilities to turn that harvested food into processed food, i.e. tomatoes into pasta sauce. “The further downstream we can think about where we access food, the more vertically integrated we can be and the more insulation we have from changing market conditions around us,” he said.
Gleaners is already adding elements of vertical integration into food sourcing through its Fresh Connect Central facility, Nieman noted. It has invested in a protein repack room, for example, that lets it accept fresh and frozen protein in bulk and repackage it, usually into retail-sized portions that it then shares with its agency partners and other food banks.
Despite all the advancements in technology, retail food sourcing will always revolve around relationships, maintains Hong. “If you build a good relationship, you build trust,” he said. “I tell people, ‘I’m here to be your partner.’” – Chris Costanzo
For much more on this topic, please see our full webinar here.
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