Less than three years ago, Chicago-based Vivery Community had one food bank using its free Find Food mapping technology to help people find pantries. Now 82 food banks in 32 states are using the maps, and 6.5 million searches have occurred on the platform since its start. That strong momentum…
Food Bank News
St. John’s Bread & Life in Brooklyn, NY, has long been a leader in giving clients an easy, de-stigmatized way to digitally browse and select pantry goods. The agency was a trend-setter as far back as 2000, when it made desktop computers available so clients could place their grocery orders…
The ‘One Big Beautiful Bill Act’ signed into law on July 4, is landing with a thud among food bank leaders who fear aggressive cuts to SNAP and Medicaid will put more pressure on the hunger relief system. Provisions in the law put more than five million people at risk…
Houston Food Bank has found an unconventional way to improve the experiences of pantry clients by tapping mystery shoppers, a tactic typically used in retail. With its Neighbor Experience Initiative, the food bank deployed mystery shoppers to report back on their in-person interactions at several pantries. Through the lens of…
Food bankers often say that when you’ve seen one food bank, you’ve seen one food bank. The same could be said for mobile markets. All mobile markets have the goal of addressing food insecurity in communities with limited access to fresh, affordable food, but they may differ in the details…
In 2022, when a California law went into effect requiring restaurants and other food producers to donate their surplus edible food rather than send it to landfills, no one knew what sort of impact the law would have. As the first of ten such laws passed nationwide aimed at reducing…
Many people may know DC Central Kitchen as the inspiration for world-renowned chef José Andrés’ global version of the same concept, World Central Kitchen. But the DC-based outfit also stands out for its innovative, on-the-ground hunger relief efforts, particularly its Healthy Corners initiative, which utilizes urban corner stores as distribution…
Mid-Ohio Food Collective is no stranger to the community service model of food banking, which pairs a broad range of social services alongside food distribution. In fact, the food bank helped pioneer the concept with its Mid-Ohio Markets – eight of them so far – that combine free grocery markets…
When Second Harvest Heartland of Minneapolis gave itself the goal of cutting hunger in half by 2030, it struggled mightily with defining exactly what success would look like. Would it succeed when people could get the food they needed by going to a pantry or using SNAP? Or would it…