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How Supply Chain Issues Are Affecting Food Pantries
At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, cars lined up for miles and miles as people waited to receive a basket of food to get them through the next week. For millions of Americans, this was a first. In 2020, one in every five people had to turn to the charitable food segment for help. The loss of jobs and the suffering economy caused more than three million Americans to experience food insecurity for the first time in their lives. “COVID created what we like to call the perfect storm for the charitable food system. We saw immediate disruption in the supply chain, there was an immediate need for help in our neighbors who were facing food insecurity, and there were shifts to how we distributed food due to safety protocols. And we are still facing all of those challenges,” says Casey Marsh, Chief Development Officer for Feeding America.
“During the pandemic, a lot of people came to us who probably never thought they’d need food assistance. We were seeing previous volunteers or donors in line for an emergency kit of food,” says David May, director of marketing and communications for the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank. Pre-pandemic, May estimates that they reached around 300,000 people across their three locations; now, he says that number is closer to 900,000, which is nearly 10 percent of the population in LA county.