Canned goods emergency at Columbia food bank: Harvest Hope has urgent summer need

Many bins of canned goods for hungry families who rely on Harvest Hope Food Bank are empty, and people who depend on the giant food distributor will face even tougher times if help doesn’t arrive quickly.

“I need an influx of some major donors,” Harvest Hope chief executive officer Denise Holland said Tuesday of what she called a food emergency. “I need a lot of hearts to be softened. I need it fast.”

For the second time in some 3 1/2 years, the food bank that serves 20 counties has made a public appeal to food manufacturers, distributors, grocery stores, corporate backers and individual donors.

Harvest Hope is caught in the same vice that food banks are facing nationally, Holland said. Supply is down because canned food makers, distributors and grocery stores have tightened their inventories, she said. That means fewer cans left over for donation or sale to food banks at reduced prices.

Other contributors have pulled back, too.

“Cash donations have not been as high this summer,” Holland said. “Food drives have not been as high this summer. People may think, ‘I donated during the (October) flood and I can take a vacation from it.’ I thought people would continue to give after the flood.”

Ben Foster of North Columbia and his wife, Mary, took an hourlong bus ride Tuesday on their every-other-month visit to the food bank on Shop Road in south Columbia.

The Fosters, both 59 and dealing with health problems, were able to get canned goods along with frozen chicken, pasta, bologna and bacon before their pantry at home becomes empty.

As he does routinely, Ben Foster stuffed a suitcase and a back pack with the food and caught a series of buses to get to medical appointments he and his wife, who has a pacemaker, had downtown Tuesday.

“It’s pretty heavy,” Ben Foster said of the load. “So I got my workout today.

“I would have been in a hurt” if Harvest Hope had run out of canned goods, he said.

Holland said she has lined up a truckload of 36,000 canned products that could help feed 7,500 families for a couple of weeks. She needs the $21,000 to buy and ship the food here.

“It’s faster and more efficient for me to go out and buy canned goods than for me to wait on a food drive,” Holland said. “If I ordered today, I can probably get it here by Friday.”

Normally, just the transportation cost per truckload is $4,000 to $5,000, she said. The $21,000 includes shipping costs, Holland said.

Canned food is part of the mix along with fresh produce and frozen meats that are part of the 25 million pounds of food Harvest Hope distributed in the past 12 months, its figures show.

Fresh fruits, vegetables and meats are healthier, Holland said, but canned goods store longer and feed people longer.

And while the supply of food is down, demand is up in Harvest Hope’s service area.

The organization distributed 1 million more pounds of food during the fiscal year that ended June 30 than it did during the same time a year before, according to the nonprofits’ data.

Put another way, Harvest Hope’s network handed out 24.9 million pounds through June 30, 2016, compared with 23.9 million during the previous 12 months, the organization said.

The number of people served rose almost 21 percent, to 24,530. The number of new clients rose by 26 percent, to 844 – and half that number were military personnel, including active duty, retirees and veterans, the data show.

The growth in a hungry population meant 800,000 more meals that Harvest Hope provided.

Many in Harvest Hope’s network of 200 organizations that take what Harvest Hope gives them and make it available to others are too small to have refrigeration, she said. They want canned food for their clients.

The need has stayed high since the record-setting flood last fall, Holland said. “The poorer are the ones who are not recovering as fast,” she said. “Senior citizens are not recovering as fast.”

Harvest Hope staffers had been noticing the decreasing inventory of canned food for about two weeks.

The organization normally organizes 200 to 400 food drives per summer. This summer the number is at the lowest end of that range, Holland said. She has asked the person who coordinates them to reach out to churches, businesses and others who usually step up, to arrange more soon.

“It’s not a lack of planning,” she said of the trends that closed in on Harvest Hope. “The critical time ... is definitely during the summer or anytime school is out. We clearly don’t have enough (canned goods). So I had to pull this trigger” and issue a public appeal.

This story was originally published August 9, 2016 at 6:56 PM with the headline "Canned goods emergency at Columbia food bank: Harvest Hope has urgent summer need."