Low-income Americans need more help getting enough to eat, but not much of the food retailers that sell groceries could potentially donate is given away. Only 13% of it ends up at food banks, according to a 2026 report produced by ReFED, a nonprofit that studies and tries to prevent food waste.
The rest is composted; turned into animal feed, biofuels and other industrial products; sold at a deep discount shortly before its use-by date; or disposed of in landfills and incinerators.
Given that millions of Americans are losing access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits and grocery prices are rising, why isn’t more food sent to food banks?
I’m a supply chain scholar who studies food banks. I conduct research about how food retailers and food banks work together to save food that would otherwise be wasted. I’ve found that those retailers don’t regularly tell food banks how much food they have available. That lack of communication, combined with capacity constraints at food banks, limits the volume of what food banks can get from supermarkets and similar stores.
No way to plan with precision
Food banks are large-scale warehouses that procure, store and distribute donated food from businesses, including supermarkets. Food pantries, by contrast, are smaller nonprofits that distribute food directly to those in need, such as faith-based soup kitchens and community food assistance programs.
Food banks are largely responsible for picking up food that retailers wish to donate and would otherwise discard. The donated food is then distributed to food pantries, where it is ultimately provided to low-income individuals and families.
This arrangement is mutually beneficial. Food banks generally want more donations, and retailers often have strong social and economic reasons to provide them.
Food banks manage fleets of vehicles of various sizes. Food bank logistics managers design routes and dispatch vehicles to visit as many retail store locations as often as possible. A food bank’s procurement territory could stretch across 20 counties and include hundreds of stores.
However, a big problem is that retailers rarely tell food banks how much food to expect, making all logistical decisions even more complicated than you might expect. For example, food banks usually don’t know how big a truck to send, how many staff members and volunteers will be needed to load and unload, or the quality and remaining shelf life of the donated items.
Consequently, food banks set somewhat arbitrary schedules.
A standard pickup schedule might involve dispatching a tractor-trailer to the local Costco store each day, while sending a smaller box truck to a rural Kroger supermarket once per week. This approximately matches the food banks’ pickup capacity with the stores’ demand for pickups or the expected volume of food available to donate.
Not enough trucks or labor
Scheduling pickups week in and week out helps food banks make long-term plans. They can figure out, for example, how many trucks they need in their fleets to haul donations.
But it doesn’t help with short-term planning. Without accurate information about what to expect, there’s no way for food banks to change course to accommodate any unexpected change in the volume of food available to donate.
Food banks also manage the flow of food from other sources besides retailers, such as federal commodity programs, items that food banks buy from wholesalers and donations from farmers, manufacturers and distributors.
Managing this diverse portfolio of food sources tends to exceed what a food bank’s fleet and staff can handle. Because every pickup requires trucks, labor and time, capacity constraints often prevent food banks from collecting donations from every retail store on a daily basis.
Food pantries join the pickup game
Over the past decade, I’ve seen most U.S. food banks adjust their supply chains to boost donations.
Starting in 2016, the usual system began to change. Many stores now donate directly to food pantries, bypassing the food bank altogether. A hybrid model, with both food banks and food pantries picking up food from stores, is especially popular with the high-volume, big-box retailers that are located far from any food bank warehouse. In those cases, local pantries are often closer by.
Operations management scholar Ken Boyer and I studied what happens when food pantries begin to pick up donated food directly. We observed what happened at five big-box stores from April 2017 to March 2018 as food pantries began to directly pick up more donated food.
We found that while food pantry pickups can increase donations, it also shifts and intensifies bottlenecks down the food donation supply chain.
The best-performing store increased its average monthly donations from 972 pounds (441 kilograms) across five pickups to 2,066 pounds (937 kilograms) across 16 pickups, a 110% increase in donation volume alongside a 220% increase in pickup frequency. But we couldn’t estimate the donation rate at that store or the other four due to a lack of data on how much food was available for those in need.
Unpredictable staffing was also an issue. Since food pantry pickups often relied on volunteers with their personal vehicles, rather than a food bank’s paid staff driving its own trucks, those pickups were much less reliable. And when a food pantry missed a scheduled pickup, it significantly disrupted in-store donation processes and undermined the store managers’ confidence that donated food would be collected as planned.
This uncertainty affected whether food was set aside for donation or thrown out.
Today, most food banks across the country have incorporated at least some pickups by food pantries from retailers into their donation systems. Yet data on what food will be available, at what time and at which store is still missing. This data could go a long way in closing the gap between the amount of food that’s available to donate and what actually is donated.
It is worth noting that food pantries have tighter budgets than food banks, with stronger preference than food banks for certain kinds of food, such as meat and produce. They also have less storage space than food banks, compounding the capacity constraints that were already limiting donations when only food banks were picking food up from stores.
Better data and more reliable staffing would go a long way in making sure that more donated food gets to those who need it the most.
John Lowrey is an assistant professor of supply chain and health sciences at Northeastern University.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
