Mobile Food Pantries Spread

An article in Wednesday's New York Times tells how the Greater Boston Food Bank has designed a mobile pantry program to serve "food deserts" in the Boston area.  Food deserts are areas without access to normal channels of food purchasing like grocery stores and farmers markets.

What's missing from the article is that Foodshare has provided support and technical assistance to our friends in Boston to get this program off the ground.  Since we have been operating Mobile Foodshare for ten years, we have some expertise to offer others, including Connecticut Food Bank, serving the shoreline area of the state, where, in the last year, they have opened eleven mobile pantry sites.

Mobile Foodshare will be seeing some changes in 2012.  The program had grown up site by site and we just plugged each new site into whatever timeslot we had available.  Earlier this year, we put all of 60 sites into the UPS Roadnet software we use for routing trucks.  Even after some manual adjustments to allow for unique circumstances, we have come up with a plan that should allow us to add as many as 20 more Mobile Foodshare sites without adding a truck or driver!  To do this, we will clearly need to increase the food supply, so additional support from donors will be needed.  We expect to be strategic in adding new sites, but identifying areas where the PPIP (pounds per person in poverty) is lowest and looking for host organizations in those neighborhoods.