Creating and implementing a nutrition policy can be a daunting task, but it’s possible to do it step by step, taking advantage of the many tools available to make it easier. HER Guidelines The most important of these may be the Healthy Eating Research guidelines. Released in 2020, the guidelines…
Food Bank News
When Mid-Ohio Food Collective opens its Eastland Prosperity Center in the fall, it will be a fitting capstone to the career of Matt Habash, who recently announced his retirement from the food bank after 42 years. More than four decades ago, Habash decided to forego law school to instead work…
At the Food Club Network in Michigan, patrons are not “clients” or “neighbors,” but “members,” highlighting a novel way of doing hunger relief that is about to expand. Seeking to create an experience that resembles typical grocery shopping, the Food Club Network has pioneered well-stocked, healthy-food pantries that offer 30-day…
Food banking may be fueled by tangible, non-artificial things – like food and relationships. But it turns out that there is also plenty of room for artificial intelligence to play a role in the fundamental act of feeding people. As with any organization, the functions of a food bank include…
GUEST POST FROM ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE – Artificial intelligence is no longer a distant promise for the charitable food system. It is arriving now — in donor segmentation tools, demand forecasting pilots, automated grant drafting, and logistics optimization experiments across food banks of every size. But what does the next three…
Food banks broke the record books in 2025 in terms of raising funds and growing donors, outperforming even Covid-era results. The government shutdown during the fall, combined with ongoing reductions in SNAP funding, drove a year-end surge in crisis-driven fundraising, according to RKD Group’s 2025 food bank benchmark report, which…
Many food banks operate agency co‑op purchasing programs, but few fully optimize them. One mid-sized food bank recently demonstrated how much untapped potential these programs hold. Without adding warehouse space, hiring staff, or investing in new infrastructure, the organization increased annual co‑op revenue from $72,000 to more than $600,000. At…
San Francisco-Marin Food Bank is proving that people with lived experience of hunger have a multitude of expertise to lend to food banks. Like a growing number of food banks, it already taps its participants to tell their personal stories to legislators to advocate for policy change. Soon it will…
This month, Claire Babineaux-Fontenot will transition out of her role as CEO of Feeding America, seven and a half years after taking the helm. She has had a tremendous impact on the network, perhaps most notably by giving people with lived experience of hunger greater say in how the food…