Foodbank is Netting Edibles off the Web

April 29, 2007

Times Argus
BARRE – Tom Abbiati logged on to his laptop and pulled up America's Second Harvest online ordering system.

Abbiati, who procures the food that the Vermont Foodbank distributes to the state's food shelves, senior centers, shelters and after-school programs, looked over the choices: 2,160 pounds of assorted cereal from Mechanicsville, Va.; 42,000 pounds of fresh carrots from Weslaco, Texas; 32,000 pounds of orange and apple juice from Auburndale, Fla.; 3,740 pounds of empty banana boxes from Atlanta; 36,000 pounds of peppermint-flavored whipped cream from Delhi, N.Y.

He decided to pass on the morning's offerings.

"I have a load of Minute Maid orange juice coming in next week from Florida. Right now we have plenty of beverages," he said. "In the cooler we have a lot of potatoes and apples that we got last week. I try not to overstock the cooler."

Abbiati has a wireless card, and even when he's on the road, which is often, he checks the America's Second Harvest Web site twice a day.

There was no such thing as online ordering when the Vermont Foodbank opened 20 years ago as a central point for collecting edible foodstuffs. The foodbank operated out of an 1,800-square-foot building in Berlin. In its first year, it distributed 144,000 pounds of food to 72 local food shelves.Today, the foodbank is housed in a cavernous warehouse, a 28,000-square-foot Costco-like structure that holds 1 million pounds of food, in Barre's Wilson Industrial Park. Last year, through its 270 network partners (100 local food shelves and 170 other agencies), it distributed 6.5 million pounds of food. The budget for this year is nearly $9 million. As Karen McGinty, a foodbank spokeswoman, observed, "What we do is big business."

Abbiati's job illustrates just how large, and how sophisticated, the business of hunger has become. Abbiati procures the food that ends up on the shelves of the Montpelier Food Pantry and the tables of Rutland's Dismas House from a variety of sources. One of them is America's Second Harvest, a national network that provides member foodbanks with nearly 2 billion pounds of food a year donated by commercial growers and food processors.

Abbiati "buys" the food not with money, but through shares based on the proportion of the population living in poverty. Members bid shares as though they are buying on eBay.

His decisions involve judgments and trade-offs. Although Abbiati doesn't pay cash for food he gets through America's Second Harvest, he does have to pay for transportation and that influences what he orders. "Right now lettuce is coming out of California and Arizona. It's too expensive to transport," he said. "If you look at a load of produce out of California right now, it might cost $4,000 to $4,500 to ship it across the country." He'll wait until lettuce is available from East Coast growers.

In 2005, the Vermont Foodbank joined with foodbanks in Rhode Island, Connecticut and Shrewsbury, Mass., to form a regional consortium for improving bidding clout and sharing transportation costs.

America's Second Harvest doesn't split lots, so having more shares gives members the ability to obtain a greater variety of foods. The "Shrewsbury cluster" just won a bid on a truckload of cottage cheese that the foodbanks divided among themselves.

"(Cottage cheese) is not readily available," Abbiati said, predicting that food shelves would be clamoring for it. But he noted that he couldn't have bought it on his own because it would spoil before all of it could be used.

In addition to America's Second Harvest, the foodbank gets products from two federal commodities programs. Last year it distributed more than 1.4 million pounds of government commodities to eligible partners through the Emergency Food Assistance Program. (Because of cuts in the federal program, the foodbank's allocation has shrunk from 1.7 million pounds in 2004.)

The foodbank is also a distributor for the federal Commodity Supplemental Food Program; it delivers boxes of food for more than 4,000 people a month at 151 drop sites around the state – the Rutland fairgrounds, the Congregational Church in Pittsford, the Illingsworth Hall Senior Center in Brandon, and in one case, a parking lot. The Commodity Supplemental Food Program is a nutrition program for low-income elderly people, and for children under 6, pregnant women and new mothers who aren't in the WIC program.

At one end of the foodbank's warehouse near the loading dock is the "sorting room," where on designated Saturdays, and sometimes during the week, Rotarians, Norwich cadets, church members, retirees, school groups, clients of Washington County Mental Health and other "sort-a-thon" volunteers gather to pack boxes of federal commodities. Each box contains 35 pounds of fruit juice, evaporated milk or instant dry milk, rice or pasta, canned vegetables, dried beans and American cheese. The goal is to provide nutrients that are typically lacking in the diets of the people in the target groups.

On other days, volunteers sort donated salvage. A jack holding a pallet of banana boxes sits inside the door of the sorting room. "Everything in foodbanking is done through banana boxes," Abbiati observed. "When we get our salvage from Hannaford's or Shaw's, it comes in banana boxes. We ship product out in banana boxes. They hold 40 pounds of bananas. They're sturdy. They're the backbone of the foodbanking world."

A conveyor belt, terminating at a stainless steel table holding labels and scales, runs down the middle of the 30-foot by 50-foot sorting room. Alongside it stands a line of stainless steel tables with signs giving sorting instructions for various categories of salvage: "Snacks: 25 lbs. Chips, popcorn, granola bars, crackers, candy, etc. Do not put all the same item in one box." "Tomato: 40 lbs. Assorted tomato products: diced, stewed crushed tomatoes; spaghetti sauce, tomato paste, etc. Do not put all the same item in one box. Must be assorted."

The boxes of salvage are added to the foodbank's "shopping list," along with the items from America's Second Harvest.

The foodbank is in the process of implementing a Web-based ordering system for its members, but for now it e-mails or faxes shopping lists to the agencies every morning: poppy seed dressing (37 cases); Cornish hens (1,318 cases); Scope mouthwash (593 cases); Oreo cookies (129 cases); Poland Spring water (123 cases); macaroni and cheese (902 cases); hamburger patties (399 cases) and strawberry jelly (170 cases). The Foodbank's five trucks are on the road five days a week delivering orders to network partners around the state.

Foodbanks are often criticized for their starchy food selection. Abbiati agrees that it is hard to make a well-balanced meal from food given by national donors. That's where local donors come in; Abbiati relies on them for items unavailable from other sources.

"Where I spend most of my time is out on the road working with local donors," he said.

It's a job for which Abbiati is uniquely qualified. For nine years before he joined the foodbank, he worked in food sales for Sysco Food Services. "It gave me a good food background and great contacts," he observed.

Cabot Creamery, Grafton Village Cheese Company, Vermont Butter and Cheese and the Vermont Milk Company in Hardwick donate hard-to-find dairy products.

"Hood gave us 600 gallons of milk during the blizzard because they overproduced and knew immediately that people weren't getting to the stores to pick it up," Abbiati said. "This was a nice, fresh product. We still had seven to 10 days to the sell-by date. We distributed it out and it was gone within four days."

Hannaford pulls meat off its shelves on the "freeze-by" date, freezes it and donates it to the foodbank.

The foodbank "rescues" the meat from eight stores in an area stretching from Enosburg to Rutland to Springfield, brings it back to the Barre warehouse, inspects it, rewraps it and ships it out to partner agencies.

Hannaford also donates fresh meat used in the Vermont Foodbank's kitchen for making prepared meals. The meals, packaged in two-serving and 10-serving barrier-shrink bags and frozen, are popular with the elderly and with the people who prepare food at community meal sites. Between frozen and fresh products, Hannaford donates about 100,000 pounds of meat to the foodbank each year.

In the summer, farmers give unsold produce to the foodbank. And not all local donations come from the food industry. IBM recently gave the foodbank 90 computers for its network partners.

Another strategy the foodbank uses to improve its selection is the Food Purchase Program, a $300,000 budget for buying products to supplement donated foods. Tuna fish and peanut butter, both good sources of protein, are "just not donated," Abbiati said. The foodbank gets quotes for such products, buys them in bulk and adds them to the shopping list at cost.

In 2006, the Vermont Foodbank and Food Works, a nonprofit organization whose mission is to address the root causes of hunger, joined forces to create the Foodbank Farm at Two Rivers Center in Montpelier. Improvising on the concept of "community supported agriculture," the foodbank contracted with Food Works to buy its entire crop and made shares available to its agencies. Through this arrangement, it was able to provide its network partners with 40,000 pounds of fresh, locally grown carrots, potatoes, onions and tomatoes.

"The complex problem of hunger has no one solution," said Christine Foster, who shares the position of chief executive officer at the foodbank. "With the increasing costs of the basic necessities that keep us functioning within society – from the gasoline and cars that get us to our jobs, to the rent or mortgages that exceed our wages – many of us simply can't keep up." What was true 20 years ago when the findings of the first Governor's Task Force on Hunger were reported is true today, she said: "Hunger largely exists because of poverty."

In the past 10 years, the Vermont Foodbank has tripled the amount of food it distributes (it now helps 140,000 Vermonters each year), but its very success is a sign of the intractability of the hunger problem.

Since Jan. 1, the foodbank has signed on nine more network partners. Food shelf caseloads have grown by 23 percent since 2003. The number of children being supported by food shelves has increased 21 percent in the past two years.

April 29, 2007

Press Room