Food bank speeds up expansion plan
With many more in search of help, warehouse needs are also increasing
When the San FranciscoMarin Food Bank started planning its $40 million warehouse expansion five years ago, the idea was to put the organization on pace to meet demand expected to grow gradually over the next two decades.
Then came the pandemic. Layoffs and furloughs skyrocketed, increasing the number of households turning to the food bank for help by more than 70%, from 32,000 to about 55,000. Traffic to the “find food” page on the food bank’s website is four times what it was before the pandemic.
Suddenly the expanded warehouse was no longer about planning for 2040. It was about getting groceries to families right now.
“The pandemic has brought forth a need that we are committed to delivering on right now. This renovation is critical for us to meet this elevated need,” said Tanis Crosby, executive director of the food bank. “There is no vaccine for hunger.”
Construction crews arrived last month in Potrero Hill to start work at the food bank’s Pennsylvania Street headquarters. The current 55,000squarefoot space will be expanded by 32,000 square feet by pushing out into the parking lot at 900 Pennsylvania St. Two additional loading docks will provide 50% more capacity, allowing the food bank to handle as many as 18 trucks per day, up from 12.
The changes are responding not only to a jump in need, but also to the reality that the pandemic has altered how the food bank gets groceries to households. With dozens of pantries closed because of the shelterinplace order, the food bank ramped up its home delivery service, going from delivering to about 250 families a week to a peak of 12,000. Meanwhile it opened 29 popup pantries, including one at the Cow Palace that serves 1,000 families a week.
The food bank opened phone centers with volunteers taking orders and answering questions in a
multitude of languages. Some 200 volunteers now drive around the city delivering food to people, including many elderly who are not able to make it to the pantries.
“How we were distributing food to the community completely shifted overnight,” said Crosby.
Chief Operating Officer Michael Wirkkala said the longrange plan assumed that increased population would ratchet up demand to about 75 million pounds a year by 2040. Instead, the food bank now projects that it will distribute 80 million pounds this year.
The increase in demand has forced the food bank to lease a patchwork of storage spaces in seven additional buildings around the city as well as in South San Francisco. Operating scattered warehouses is inefficient — the new space will allow most of them to be consolidated.
About 60% of what the food bank delivered is fresh fruit and vegetables — on Thursday the warehouse will be full of freshly delivered pallets of apples, turnips, cantaloupes and kiwi. The lack of cold storage has been particularly difficult, Wirkkala said, and the expanded facility will provide four times the cold storage — about 5,200 square feet.
While the food bank “turns over” its meat and other perishable goods as fast as possible, “there have been times we have had to turn trucks away” due to lack of coldstorage capacity, Wirkkala said.
The pandemic has also been a rollercoaster ride for the food bank’s volunteer program, according to Katy McKnight, director of community engagement. Before the pandemic, the food bank had about 1,200 volunteers a week. When sheltering in place kicked in, 3,500 individual reservations were canceled in a week or two.
“It just wiped out our volunteer programs,” said McKnight.
“We flatlined in March and April. We went into panic mode.”
The food bank put out an SOS and volunteers responded in droves, signing up to deliver groceries and staff the popup pantries.
“The response from the community was amazing,” McKnight said. “We went from not knowing how we were going to operate to having a full suite of volunteers.”
But as the economy reopens, the food bank is again seeing a dropoff — the current need requires about 2,000 volunteer shifts a week, and in recent weeks they have been hard to fill.
“The world is opening up again. People are going to work and getting vaccinated and feeling comfortable traveling again,” McKnight said. “We have seen a pretty dramatic decline in volunteer support in the last few weeks. We are hoping it’s a shortlived problem.”
The expansion will also allow the number of organizations the food bank works with to increase from 380 to 500. It will allow the group to host an additional 20,000 volunteers a year.