After that encounter, van Hengel established St. Mary’s Food Bank in Phoenix, AZ, as the first food bank in the United States. In its initial year, St. Mary’s distributed 275,000 pounds of food to people in need. Word of the food bank’s success quickly spread, and by 1977, food banks had been established in 18 cities across the country. As the number of food banks continued to increase, van Hengel saw the need for a network organization to help them grow and coordinate. In 1979, he and other partners founded a national organization for food banks called Second Harvest. The network changed its name in 2008 to Feeding America.
Today, Feeding America is the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization—a powerful and efficient network of 200 food banks across the country. As food insecurity rates hold steady at the highest levels ever, the Feeding America network of food banks has risen to meet the need. The network feeds 46 million people at risk of hunger, including 12 million children and 7 million seniors annually.
Feeding America and its partners not only lead in hunger-relief efforts, but they also lead the hunger-relief community in providing safe food. The rapidly changing product mix from shelf-stable to perishable foods flowing into food banks compels the network to develop increasingly sophisticated food safety practices so that such products reach the consumer safely. Accordingly, Feeding America is working hard to help its member food banks continuously improve their food safety acumen (see “Food Safety in the Feeding America Network,” p. 64). This important work reflects our commitment to establish, maintain and sustain robust standards that carefully steward our donors’ resources to provide safe food to the people we serve.
Taking a Giant Step Forward
Feeding America is fortunate to have an enduring relationship with Cargill. Over the years, Cargill has been generous in its support for both Feeding America’s national office and our member food banks across the country. In 2012, our partnership with Cargill took a significant step forward when Feeding America started thinking more critically about the future of food safety. With the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) moving forward, Feeding America saw the need for the network to be well prepared for the final FSMA rules. We asked Cargill to help this effort through funding for staffing, educational summits and third-party food safety audits. Cargill understood the importance and urgency of our proposed food safety strategy and got the program off the ground with a 2-year grant.
Third-party food safety audits were new to the network and participation was voluntary. Although progress was slow at first, early adopters of the auditing program soon recognized and communicated the benefits of participation. These benefits include: 1) better depth of understanding of their food banking operations; 2) increased efficiencies in their operations through written Standard Operating Procedures; 3) improved staff training; 4) improved management of pest control operator relationships; and 5) higher operational standards and results. After the first year of training audits, a handful of early adopters started scored audits, which they passed with high scores. Notwithstanding this incremental success, it was clear we needed to do more to encourage the rest of the food banks to engage in the program. As the initial grant period ended, Feeding America approached Cargill with another idea. We wanted to focus on providing resources to achieve a holistic shift in food bank food safety culture. Our vision went beyond auditing and deeper than the food bank level. We wanted to provide educational opportunities and resources to our 60,000 agency partners (soup kitchens, shelters and pantries)—the end of the supply chain. Cargill endorsed the concept with a generous 3-year grant to support the enhanced food safety initiatives we envisioned. Once Cargill said yes, we quickly got busy.
Third-party food safety audits were new to the network and participation was voluntary. Although progress was slow at first, early adopters of the auditing program soon recognized and communicated the benefits of participation. These benefits include: 1) better depth of understanding of their food banking operations; 2) increased efficiencies in their operations through written Standard Operating Procedures; 3) improved staff training; 4) improved management of pest control operator relationships; and 5) higher operational standards and results. After the first year of training audits, a handful of early adopters started scored audits, which they passed with high scores. Notwithstanding this incremental success, it was clear we needed to do more to encourage the rest of the food banks to engage in the program. As the initial grant period ended, Feeding America approached Cargill with another idea. We wanted to focus on providing resources to achieve a holistic shift in food bank food safety culture. Our vision went beyond auditing and deeper than the food bank level. We wanted to provide educational opportunities and resources to our 60,000 agency partners (soup kitchens, shelters and pantries)—the end of the supply chain. Cargill endorsed the concept with a generous 3-year grant to support the enhanced food safety initiatives we envisioned. Once Cargill said yes, we quickly got busy.
Building the Foundation
We developed a multifaceted approach to reinforce the food safety programs that already existed in the network. Our challenge was to provide the same opportunities and information to each food bank while avoiding a cookie-cutter approach that ignored each food bank’s unique situation, knowledge base and resources. We overcame this challenge with five specific action items.
1. Provide dollars to support improvements. Initially, we created a considerable amount of conversation to get food banks to participate in the third-party auditing program—seizing every opportunity to discuss it. There was a lot of trepidation within the network about our chosen vendor’s distribution center standard and how it would impact operations. Many of the food banks wondered if the application of a food manufacturing standard even made sense. Thus, we faced a great deal of pushback, and understandably so. Who wants another audit? In an effort to respond to this anxiety, we sought to incentivize participation by providing grants. We developed a request for proposals so the network could access grant dollars specifically for food safety improvements. The key eligibility requirement was that the food bank applicant had to be actively participating in the program by having completed a training audit within the last 12 months. The grant dollars would be utilized to correct any issues identified in the food bank’s third-party audit report. The grants quickly became very competitive and created a buzz about the food safety program within the network. Activity in the program soared. It became so well socialized that within 1½ years, we achieved over a 90 percent voluntary participation rate in the network.
2. Free education and training for the network. We decided that we needed to create a forum or summit to deliver specific information regarding our vendors’ distribution center standard. We developed our Food Safety Summit (FSS) to bring network staff together to learn the critical elements of the new standard. The FSS was initially for those food banks that self-identified as needing additional education and training in food safety, but it became a training opportunity for all network food banks. The FSS takes place at a food bank that passed a scored audit and is a 2-day, intensive drill-down of the new distribution center standards by a qualified instructor from the audit vendor. The FSS also includes a complete warehouse walk-around to illustrate examples of how the new standards should be implemented. These summits were a success and greatly advanced our education and training plan. As we had hoped, the FSS provided a safe environment for people to learn and ask questions among peers, thereby creating an atmosphere that encourages team building, networking and sharing of best practices. Funds from the Cargill grant allowed Feeding America to provide training for more than 250 individuals from all 200 food banks. Now the fundamental issue—lack of understanding of the expectations of the new distribution center standard—no longer existed.
