Tuesday morning, workers zipped around Mid-Ohio Food Collective’s Grove City warehouse on forklifts, beeping as they restocked shelves.
Even as they filled some empty spaces with the plastic-wrapped pallets of food brought by trucks, many gaps remained. The warehouse shelves haven’t always looked so sparse. Brad Draper, senior vice president of operations, said that in 2021, Mid-Ohio Food Collective actually had to add storage space.
“How full the shelves are isn't really our measure of success. Our measure of success is how many people we're going to be able to feed. And yet, when we're able to provide less food to each person who comes asking for help, that's certainly discouraging for us and for our partner network,” Draper said.
Last year, about 85 million pounds of food passed through the warehouse, which largely acts as a distribution center to get food to Mid-Ohio Food Collective’s smaller partners and programs. That food fed about 5,000 families a day across 20 Ohio counties, Draper said.
This year, the food bank will likely see less food pass through its warehouse due to reductions in state and federal funding.
Draper said Ohio’s recently passed biennial budget will take about $3 million worth of food off of Mid-Ohio Food Collective’s shelves in the next two years.
“Essentially, the state has taken us back to 2019 levels of funding,” Draper said. “And I think we can all look at our own food shopping and know that that just doesn’t stretch as far as it did before.”
At the same time, Mid-Ohio Food Collective is impacted by federal reductions. Draper said Mid-Ohio will get less food from local farmers due to changes in the local food purchase program. The food bank is also getting less funding related to emergency food assistance through the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Meanwhile, need is not slowing down.
“We expect to feed the same number of people, if not more, because the lines aren't getting any shorter at our locations. But we do expect each shopping cart to be a little bit lighter, to probably have a little less variety in it, because when there are fewer resources coming into the system, we have to stretch those resources a little further,” Draper said.
A statement from Mid-Ohio Food Collective President Matt Habash lays out the consequences of less funding. There will be less food at local food pantries, including less shelf-stable food like canned goods rice, and pasta. Mid-Ohio Food Collective will rely more heavily on donations, and rural communities will feel the brunt of the pain.
Draper also expects need to increase as people lose federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits, that had allowed them to purchase groceries.
“SNAP provides nine times the resources nationally as all the food banks in the country combined. And so, there's no way that we'll be able to make up for changes in that program,” Draper said.
Draper said Mid-Ohio Food Collective also won’t be able to make up for the loss in funding, though he said the food bank has been “incredibly fortunate” to be in such a generous community where individuals, retailers, wholesalers and others in the food industry support the organization’s mission.
“The core of food banking is taking surplus food in the community and getting it to the folks who need it, and that mission will never change,” Draper said. “We've been doing this for 45 years. So, we've been through a number of cycles, up and down, and they're all different. But we've managed.”
