Where I am, the food bank sends out a truck to certain locations where they distribute food to the folks who show up.
Every week, they go a parking lot down the road from me. And folks show up for bread, milk, etc., and canned foods.
Around the holidays, the local supermarkets sell vouchers or something for Thanksgiving and Christmas. You buy one (say for ten bucks), and the store sends the ten dollars to the food bank (or other agency) who uses it for Thanksgiving (or Christmas) for the homeless, the down-on-their-luck, or families in domestic abuse shelters.
No, free food is not free. It takes money to store, sort, transport and distribute the “free” food so it gets to the people who need it. Money is far easier to store and transport, and can be used to buy exactly what they need, where and when it’s needed.
Free food is free only if you don’t consider the time spent sorting and organizing it, checking to see if somebody is donating long-expired products, figuring out what to do with 47 cans of some unidentified product with a non-English label, etc., and the space required to do all of that.
If your food bank really needs peanut butter, tuna, and beans, having $200 to go buy peanut butter, tuna, and beans is better than having no money but $300 of canned sardines.
Cheap canned veggies are notoriously high in salt.
You missed the point. Yes, they’ll take and be grateful for what they can get, but cash money is more efficient.
Even on the SA Food Bank website you gave, it states that every $1 donated can provide up to 7 meals. Somebody buying $1 in canned goods at retail price (even with sales and couponing) isn’t coming anywhere near close to that.
But people would MUCH rather give extra canned goods than money. Something is definitely better than nothing but plain cash is even better than that.
I sat on the finance committee at the SAFB. I know the numbers. Y’all wrong. Food donated is far better than money donated for the purposes of buying food. There’s an entire economic infrastructure supporting the nations food banks which none of the posters here apparently are privy to (Feeding America). 40% of all donated food is sold via Feeding America and like organizations.
Storage is a fixed cost. There’s a 500,000 sf facility which is going to run regardless of whether it has any food. Yes, there are variable costs (employees, R&M, stuff like that), but taking the money needed to maintain the infrastructure to use in purchasing food is not how it works as spending money on food deducts from the funds needed to maintain the infrastructure necessary to store and hold perishables.
Transportation is done by the donator, Goodwill, or the SAFB at any one of the 100 pick up points their 32 trucks go to every day.
Distribution is the same. It’s a Food Bank, not a food distributor. The organizations who need it order the food prior, then come to the Food Bank to pick it up on their dime. The expense to distribute the food is not borne by the food bank.
Again: Y’all are operating from faulty assumptions, lack of knowledge, and… possibly… some local conditions which will not impact how the San Antonio Food Bank operates. Donate food, and ignore the OP.
Maybe that’s not true and they’re lying (!?), but the organizations you have provided links for make a strong case for preferring cash over canned goods - though they also state canned goods are totally appreciated.
And 7 meals donated is a dollar that’s not having to be spent on the food. Just because it is more efficient for you to pull out a dollar instead of rummaging through your cupboard does not mean it’s more efficient for the Food Bank to spend that dollar on the food it receives for free via Food Drives.
Well, yes, this is true, but the idea was ‘efficiency’.
Yes, if you have extra food lying around the house that won’t be used (I typically don’t), it’s typically better to make sure it goes to good use.
But a lot of canned food drives involve people going out of their way to buy food to donate, which is the situation described in several posts above - student food drives where parents buy canned goods specifically for the drive, people buying canned goods at the grocery store because they see a donation box/area, getting to the holidays and thinking they should do something and canned food seems like a good idea, a canned food drive and people feel pressured to buy something for the drive, etc.
And that’s just silly.
An unreasonably high percentage of donated canned food is bought for the purpose of donating, and that money could be better spent if given directly.
SOMEBODY is bearing that expense of distribution; dumping it off on the organization picking up the food does not make the expense zero.
If the food pantry at the Church of Saint Somebody gets $500-worth of food from the SAFB that they have to go pick up from the distribution point, how is that so much better and more efficient FOR THEM than getting $500 cash to go buy food at the local grocery store?
Unless you are driving it directly to their church pantry, somebody is still spending the time/money to go pick it up (and for a $500 order, they may get delivery from their local store). Sure, they can order from you exactly what they want from what you have in stock, but is your breadth and depth of stock at all times comparable to what their local grocer stocks?
Now, I can see an argument that getting $500 worth of all-but-expired food donated is more likely than getting $500 cash, but that doesn’t seem to be the argument you are making. For the food bank itself, donated food may be better than money, but how sure are you that the same is true for the food pantries and soup kitchens that are actually on the front lines?
But the efficiency is for the donator. It is not necessarily more efficient to spend financial resources on consumables than it is on the infrastructure needed to store and distribute those consumables, which was the guiding principle of the committee - increase food donations and cash donations, but do so in a way which maximized the efficiencies of each.
And the $1 buys 7 meals? That’s a slogan. The actual number is $1 for 33 meals, and this is… again… because of the donated food.
I mean… the SAFB has a budget of about $2.2 million. They deliver 74,000,000 meals annually. Do the math. The $1 buys 7 figure is low. It’s far better than that! And it’s low because of… food donations!
Maybe I’m missing something, but $200 of peanut butter, tuna and beans is probably a lot less food than $300 in sardines.
Why is it better than the sardines? People aren’t going there to have their culinary fantasies fulfilled, but rather to have some sort of nutritious food to eat, and sardines definitely qualify.
How do you define $500 worth of food? Isn’t $500 list price food picked up for free by the Boy Scouts or something and delivered for free to the bank going to be more food than what you can get buying it retail? Even assuming free delivery?
When I was in the Boy Scouts and did food drives I never got paid.
I donate both money directly and goods. No reason you can’t do both.
According to their website, the SAFB received about $13 million in cash donations in FY2018, against total revenues of $150,406,881. What did they do with the rest of the money?
And what would it be if some portion of those food donations were replaced by the equivalent cash donations?
You are arguing that it is “better” for the food bank if I buy $10 in canned goods and drop them in a box in front of the grocery store rather than put $10 cash in a collection box at the grocery store. How much does it cost the SAFB (in money, or in time or patience of volunteers) to transport the canned good box back to your warehouse and sort them, versus how much does it cost the SAFB to deposit the money in your bank and then order full case quantities of what you need delivered directly to your warehouse?
O.K. here’s the thing. My O.P. wasn’t mean’t to be an indictment of the economics of food banks. It’s an indictment of people who buy trash food for their Thanksgiving food drive and think they’re helping. Are they helping? Yes! But there is a better way. That’s all I’m saying. Instead of spending $10 on cans of preserved greenbeans, give the money direct so they can buy three times as many fresh green beans or hell, if they need canned green beans they can buy those too. That’s all I’m saying. Money is the only way those of us who aren’t farmers or food distributors can give fresh food.
I have no desire to vilify anybody who gives canned food, but I just want to point out that there IS an option. And it’s an easy one. Donate money instead. That’s what I have decided to do. The most important thing is just do something, and try to have the decisions you make regarding charity count.
No, not really. For example, using Walmart’s price for creamy peanut butter, a serving (2 Tbsp, 32 g, 180 calories) works out to about eight cents a serving; meanwhile, a serving of boneless sardines in oil ran about $1.58. You could play around with brands and container sizes and serving sizes, but sardines cost at least an order of magnitude more than peanut butter, and several times as much as tuna.
People picking up food at the food pantry tend to want familiar food that they know how to cook and that they know their families will eat, while soup kitchens and other communal food service activities want large quantities of the same food so that they can prepare it in bulk, and preferably food for which they have tried-and-true bulk recipes.
I work at a food pantry. Every Friday and Saturday morning we take our large van to the Oregon Food Bank for a pickup, fill it up, take it back to the pantry and stock the shelves and stack the rest in the back. Then we go through whatever food is donated by the “civic-minded” chain store down the street and toss out the unbagged stale bread, open pastry containers with pastry missing, the bagged loaves that their employees made sandwiches out of leaving maybe five or six slices, the broken bits of produce that looks like it was swept off the floor, the moldy fruit, the outdated and/or dented and/or unlabeled cans and bottles, an occasional box of corks, Easter candy in July, Halloween candy in February, Christmas candy in May etc. Do you know why they go through the trouble of gathering up crap and giving it to us instead of just tossing it in the garbage? Because they get a receipt for the weight of the goods donated, that’s why. That is also the reason we have to pay so damn much every week to have large bins of crap hauled away after we spend hours sorting it all.
By the way, donating money gets us a lot more than donating goods because the Oregon Food Bank gives us donated goods and allows us to purchase bulk commodities at a greatly discounted price. So if you are going to donate think money first, money and food second, and food third…but only if you donate goods that are properly labeled, not dented and not past the expiration date. And(at our location at least) no clothes. If we even bring donated clothes of unknown cleanliness into the building the Oregon Food Bank will yank our card immediately.
What’s your definition of trash food? I admit that Sugar Bomb Cereal with extra sugar is trash but lower-cost canned vegs are not. I agree that some people give expired items but most do not.
I’ve participated in many food drives for various organization and have seen the food banks they they stock. There are two in my area that very much appreciate the items that my wife and I bring in (we look for close-outs at grocery stores or Sams club and bring items by the case.) They have stated many times that either money OR appropriate food is warmly welcomed.
Want to give money only? Knock yourself out but allow others to do their thing without being shit at.
I really don’t understand what you are getting at here.
Edit to add: The pantries I support are geared toward providing food for families therefore smaller items are most useful. If this were an organization that required industrial-sized items, money would be our donation of choice.
Which is done by volunteers, so labor costs are minimal. In addition, food banks often get storage space donated.
But if this is a poor way of doing it, why do food banks continue to run them? They’re always strapped for cash, so why do they waste resources on something that the program doesn’t need?
My local supermarket actually makes up boxes of goods that you can buy and they’ll send them to the food bank, as well as “buy one, donate one free” promotions.