The rumbling sound of truck engines breaks the silence each morning at the Central Texas Food Bank. Before the sun rises, the Food Bank’s drivers prepare to distribute or pick up food across the 21 counties the Food Bank serves. They load pallet after pallet of non-perishable food items and produce into trucks that will travel an area twice the size of Massachusetts.
Though there are four 18-wheelers and two Mobile Pantry trucks distributing food, six box trucks distributing and picking up donations, there are only two 18-wheelers solely dedicated to donation pick-up. Unfortunately some food donations will not be getting picked up.
Even after filling each 18-wheeler with up to 22 pallets of food and each box truck with up to 10 pallets of food and starting the day at 5 A.M., it’s still not enough to reach the 471,000 Central Texans who are facing hunger.
Within our service territory, Bell County has the highest food insecurity rate. Nearly 21 percent of residents don’t know where their next meal will come from. Of those, nearly 24,000 are children.
Barbara’s family knows what it’s like not to have enough money for food. With three children to support, Barbara and her husband both worked to make ends meet. Spending money on snacks or steak on a regular basis wasn’t an issue. But things changed when her scoliosis worsened.
Her condition has limited what she can do and working a full-time job is no longer an option. Without Barbara’s income and facing increased medical costs, the family is struggling to cover their expenses. Even with her husband working overtime with 10 to 11 hour workdays, it’s still not enough for the Belton family.
“It’s really, really tight,” Barbara said. “You have to stretch that, and it’s kind of hard, we have kids, they eat a lot, and they’re growing up.”
To help more families like Barbara’s and to reduce food waste, the Food Bank implemented the Agency Retail Pickup program in 2014, which allows Partner Agencies to pick up food donations directly from retail stores.
Instead of having products travel to the Food Bank’s warehouse to await distribution, food remains in the local area for quicker distribution. Families receive fresher products faster and it allows the Food Bank to focus on other donation opportunities.
It’s a win for everyone, especially families facing hunger. But there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Last year, the program received nearly 8.3 million pounds of food and it currently has 63 Partner Agencies cooperating. Our goal is to receive 16 million pounds of food by 2021, which means donation pick-ups need to increase.
To help provide hunger relief in our highest-need area and meet our goal, the Walmart Foundation awarded the Food Bank a $50,000 infrastructure grant for two used 16-foot box trucks that have been allocated to two Partner Agencies in Bell County: Operation Phantom Support and Helping Hands Ministry of Belton.
The two trucks will allow nearly 150,000 pounds of additional food to be picked up and distributed in Bell County bringing the total amount of food distributed a year to more than 1.1 million pounds.
The extra food coming into the area means that Barbara’s family can receive food once a week at Helping Hands. They can get a variety of nutritious foods including pantry staples, fresh produce, bread and even meat.
Even though her family is struggling economically, Barbara stores away canned food here and there to help her brother who is suffering from a bad shoulder and cannot work at the moment. Though he refuses to receive help at the food pantry, when he found that the food Barbara shares with him comes from Helping Hands, “it really made his day,” she said.
Despite serving 44,400 Belton residents a year, Helping Hands relied on a single pick-up truck and a trailer that had to be attached and re-attached every time food donations were picked up. This limited transportation meant that even pantry volunteers used their own vehicles to help pick up donations.
Thanks to the grant, Helping Hands now has their first box truck that will bring in an additional 77,800 pounds of food to the pantry for a total of more than 365,000 pounds of food distributed a year.
"We're so excited to have been chosen as one of the Partner Agencies to receive a box truck for food rescue! This truck is allowing us to rescue more than 8,300 pounds of food from our local Walmart each month which helps us feed more than 4,000 people each month,” Brittany Duncan, Helping Hands Director of Community Ministries, said. “We're thankful for this additional resource and the opportunity it opens for us to do even more for our community."
For Operation Phantom Support, the largest Partner Agency in Bell County, the Food Bank has selected two stores theypick up from to pilot two additional weekly pick-ups, as well as pick up donations from another Walmart retail location. The truck will allow an additional 70,000 pounds of food to be picked up for a projected total of more than 735,000 pounds of food to be distributed that will help more than 177,000 individuals a year.
“Different people need help and it doesn’t mean you don’t have anything,” Barbara said. “It’s a really good thing that there’s help out there for needy families that need food.”
