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 Bank News
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…
GUEST POST BY STACEY CRNICH OF GOODROOTS NORTHWEST – When GoodRoots Northwest, formerly the Bonney Lake Food Bank, quietly closed the doors of its client-choice pantry, it wasn’t a sign of failure. It was a declaration of strategy and a replicable model for success. Our Pierce County, Wash.-based organization made…
As new work requirements for SNAP lurch into effect across the country, food banks and pantries are doing what they can to ease the blow. The timing of the new rules varies by state, but the upshot is that millions more Americans who previously qualified for SNAP will have to…
A framework for hunger relief pioneered in Canada is slowly making its way into the United States. Gather, a Portsmouth, N.H.-based nonprofit founded in 1816 to support the families of fishermen, has become only the second organization in the U.S. to adopt Canada’s Community Food Center model, which uses a…
After only one year of having a nutrition policy, Ferndale Food Bank of Washington state can’t imagine operating without one. Getting a nutrition policy in place went hand in hand with maturing from a very small operation into one that now serves nearly 300 people a week. As demand grew,…