PHILADELPHIA — When a cereal shipment was late arriving to Share Food Program facilities earlier this month, the team had to scramble to make sure 7,000 seniors in Philadelphia, Montgomery, and Chester Counties did not have to wait for their monthly grocery boxes.
It was the first time the program — which serves people 60 and older who are food insecure — had ever experienced such a delay, said George Matysik, Share’s executive director.
The holdup also served as a stark reminder of how supply chain issues continue to impact emergency food services at the same time need is skyrocketing.
“Right now, we don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel,” said Fred Wasiak, president and CEO of the Food Bank of South Jersey. “We are just preparing ourselves for an ambiguous year. We’re not sure what direction it’s going at this point.”
Food pantries and emergency food assistance programs across the country and the region are continuing to struggle as a year of record inflation has driven up demand and, in some cases, driven down the overall number of donations this year.
“A lot of people are feeling the pinch of rising food costs, inflation,” said Chelsea Short, director of communications and marketing at Philabundance. “It’s really hitting homes hard, even families that haven’t utilized the pantries before.”
At the same time, pandemic aid has expired, meaning less government support for emergency food services. The funds from stimulus checks and extra unemployment are running dry, affecting both those seeking help and those considering a donation.
Locally, the short-term forecast is relatively positive: November and December are usually a more plentiful month for food banks, and people who have the means to give have been generous so far this holiday season, according to 11 food banks and distribution services in the city and suburbs.
As fears of a recession continue, however, it’s unclear whether 2023 will bring more challenges for food pantries.
Food pantries have been struggling with increased demand, supply-chain issues, and an array of other issues since the pandemic began.
Those challenges have ebbed and flowed in the nearly three years since COVID-19 emerged, several pantry managers said, with inflation causing a significant stress throughout 2022.
Recent months have been especially tough, with some organizations reporting a surge in demand not seen since the early months of the pandemic — or ever. The pace of donations and other support cannot keep up, they say.
In Camden, Gloucester, Burlington, and Salem Counties this fall, 205 pantries provided food to more than 120,000 households a month, said Wasiak, of the Food Bank of South Jersey. That’s more than the 95,000 households served at the height of the pandemic, he added, and much higher than the pre-pandemic average of 40,000.
Share, the Philadelphia-based organization that distributes food to hundreds of thousands of people through pantries and other services, says the total number of people it has served increased 70% this year, Matysik said.
“Aside from March 11 to mid-July 2020 … this is the biggest challenge we’ve ever seen,” he said.
At the Mattie N. Dixon Community Cupboard in Ambler, its client base from January to mid-December increased by 45% compared to the same time last year, while donated food decreased by 10%, said executive director Cindy Wedholm.
In Fishtown, Lutheran Settlement House sees the same amount of people coming through the doors of their pantry, but they need more food, said Meg Finley, senior services and nutrition director. It is on track to distribute 400,000 pounds of food in 2022 — 100,000 more than it did in 2021, she said.
At the Upper Merion Area Community Cupboard, the weekly numbers are on par with early 2020, said pantry manager Anna Derby. They served 141 families the week before Thanksgiving, typically the year’s busiest, compared to 119 last year and 151 in 2020.
The feeding ministry at the Willow Grove Seventh Day Adventist Church in Abington is seeing only slightly more than the 200 households it was serving a year ago, said Elaine Williams, an assistant who helps with the program, but has been serving an increasing number of Ukrainian refugees.
In recent days, they’ve been helping about 20 Ukrainian refugee families, who come from as far as Northeast Philadelphia, she said, as well as another large group of refugees staying at a nearby church. They often need not only food, she said, but diapers, baby food, even sturdy shoes.
“We really do not have enough [supply],” Williams said, citing a decrease in pandemic-related grants, funding, and donations. “What we have, we try to make it stretch.”
None of the food pantry organizers said they anticipate these issues easing anytime soon. Several said they were concerned about what will happen come January, when donations typically fall off a “post-holiday cliff,” as Finley put it.
“I don’t anticipate it getting any easier for families in the next six months,” said Brooke Harvey, nutrition services coordinator at The Open Link in Pennsburg.
Some pantry managers said they wished they could receive more food from large-scale distributors, such as Philabundance and Share, but officials from those two organizations said they are struggling, too, with rising food costs and continued supply-chain issues.
At Martha’s Choice Marketplace in Norristown, food pantry manager Hannah Leifheit tries not to think about what will happen if demand continues to increase at this pace, food prices don’t decrease, and donations stagnate.
She would be devastated, she said, if Martha’s Choice had to offer less food to families who are food insecure.
But as she looks to 2023, it’s a possibility for the Montgomery County pantry, which provides food and other necessities such as diapers, soap, and detergent, to serve about 350 households a week, twice as many as this time last year, Leifheit said.
“We are maxed out,” she said. “If I start to think about rising costs and what we’re going to have to refuse our families, it kind of puts me in a state of paralysis.”
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