SEATTLE — The price of food is not getting any cheaper. The higher prices of eggs, dairy, meat, and other products are now creating a higher demand at local food banks.
Food Lifeline, which partners with local food banks to supply ingredients for meals, told KOMO News that many guests visited a food bank once or twice a month when they ran a little short. But now, post-pandemic, those same guests are relying on their local food bank every week.
Demand rose 25% during 2024, according to Food Lifeline. About 10 million people visited its 300 partner food banks compared with eight million in 2023.
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“This year, we actually had to spend an extra $800,000 in actually purchasing food to supplement what we’ve been distributing to make sure that all of our food bank partners have enough food to take care of their guests,” Mark Coleman, marketing director at Food Lifeline told KOMO News.
They also partner with many retailers, accepting their surplus food to get out of food banks. Large shipments of dairy and other refrigerated foods arrived Friday afternoon from Amazon Fresh and Safeway-Albertsons. Volunteers sorted it all by category into crates on pallets for forklift operators to move into the refrigerated area of the Hunger Solution Center.
Each bin will then be inventoried and posted for food banks to order what they know their guests need. Next to the dairy sorting, another station of volunteers relabeled donated rice. Fourteen-year-old Elise Woodey told KOMO News she has to log community service hours for school, but this volunteer work means so much more.
“Because it helps people in need it helps people around us. I don’t know who it’s going to, but it doesn’t really matter who it’s going to because I know it’s going to someone who needs it and that they deserve it because everyone needs to eat,” Woodey said.
While Elise and her mom worked on rice, other volunteers worked on sorting huge bins of pears. They chucked the bad ones into a compost bin and put the rest in 40-pound boxes, a more manageable size for food banks to pick up and then store.
This is the process for Food Lifeline securing large donations, like the semi-truck load of potatoes from a Skagit County farmer, really helps the mission thrive. By working with local farmers and retailers, Food Lifeline diverts a lot of good food from going to the landfill.
“What’s going to happen now is our volunteers are going to sort this, break it into small boxes. We’re going to put it into stock, and then our nearly 300 food banks will be able to go online and order it,” Coleman explained.
“It feels like we’re doing a lot to help the local community, especially last week when we finished. Even in just two hours, we were able to repackage almost 300 pounds of rice, and they were telling us that was going to be sent out in like the next couple of days,” Bailey Ellison told KOMO News while sorting pears in the Hunger Solution Center.
Ellison had so much fun volunteering last week, and he brought his younger brother with him. He told KOMO News that he chose Food Lifeline because of the ease of scheduling. They offer two, sometimes three, volunteer sessions a day, each lasting two hours.
It takes 20,000 volunteers to keep food moving through the warehouse and out to those who need it. Nothing sits in the building for very long. What’s packed one day is ready for food banks to order just a few days later.
The perishable items move out more quickly, but Coleman told KOMO News that the entire inventory at the Hunger Solution Center turns over every 30 days. That turn-around is needed to keep up with the 1.7 million Washingtonians visiting food banks every year.
The Hunger Solution Center adjusts and works daily to make sure there’s food for every guest that walks into one of its partner food banks.
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