Food banks struggle to cope with rising prices

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Food banks struggle to cope with rising prices

As families deal with rising grocery costs, local food assistance programs have been affected by high prices.

The nation's food banks are struggling with inflation due to the global supply chain crisis. Volunteers will distribute more than 1 million pounds of food a week in November to meet the growing needs at the Greater Cleveland Food Bank.

We gear up for the holidays months in advance. Kristin Warzocha, the organization's president and CEO, said that the need for emergency food has never been higher than during the epidemic.

Warzocha explained that prices for even the most essential foods have gone up.

This year, we ordered six truckloads of turkeys, and the cost of each turkey is up 20%. Warzocha said that peanut butter, a staple for families across the community and a staple that we distribute at the food banks, is up 40%. We had orders that were canceled at the last minute, we had orders that were bought out of us from someone paying more. Brian Greene, the president and CEO of the Houston Food Bank, told Fox News that the cost to store and transport food has also gone up.

It isn't just the food, we go through thousands of boxes a week and those costs have gone up dramatically, pallets have doubled, just the equipment we use has been harder to get and it's more expensive, Green said.

As many as 42 million people, including 13 million children, could face food insecurity in the US in the year 2021, according to Feeding America, a network of more than 200 food banks across the country.

Food banks across the country have had to adapt to meet the demand.

That could be working with brand substitutions, working with our vendors to alter delivery times, said Catherine Shick, a spokesman for FeedMore Western New York. We are trying to be as flexible as possible in order to maximize cost savings. In Houston, Greene encourages volunteers to pitch in as they did before thepandemic.

Most of our labor is done by volunteers, this is true of the Houston Food Bank and Feeding America food banks in general. People are starting to come back and we are trying to get people to come back because we have got a lot of work to do, said Greene, who said the Pandemic was a real blow to the volunteer pool.

One of the best resources to find your local food bank is the food bank.