As rising fuel prices have hit consumers, those increases have also had strong reverberations throughout the food recovery and food bank world.
Erin Ash, head of programs for Massachusetts-based Spoonfuls, says fuel prices have jumped 24% year over year. While Spoonfuls focuses on operational efficiency through route planning and logistics, the organization has continued to see costs rise. Its trucks drive about 16,000 miles a month across the state.
“We’re doing some new ways of working, like working with hubs or working with a hub-and-spoke distribution model where it makes sense,” Ash says. “We have a partner that distributes further for us, which means we’re actually saving some miles that we otherwise may have driven.”
Meanwhile in California, Sabrina Thakkar, director of Farm to Family with California Food Banks, says freight costs have more than doubled for the fresh produce the organization transports. She estimates an increase from roughly $7,000 to $12,000.
“It’s more than the produce itself on the truck,” Thakkar says. “And sometimes the food banks have to say, ‘Is this even something that we could do?’”
Soaring Fuel and Freight Costs
Thakkar says it’s frustrating as California is the epicenter of fresh fruit and vegetables and has the produce to share with food banks.
“We have the food. We just have to figure out how we can make it more cost-efficient to move the food across the country or even in California as well,” she says.
Thakkar says the impact of rising fuel costs is immediately felt by drivers, who are often just small business owners. She says they try to keep freight costs as low as possible so that it is affordable for California Food Banks.
“They believe in the food going to food banks, going to serving our communities, and they’ve showed me their bills — from $3,000 a week for one truckload with diesel, it’s gone up to about $9,000,” she says.
Ash says each of Spoonfuls’ trucks has a 38-gallon tank and each fill-up costs around $160 in gas.
“The current crisis has meant that our focus is on operational efficiency, which does, frankly, exist both with and without a fuel crisis,” Ash says. “What’s much more important to us is that overall operational efficiency as we build our routes.”
Spoonfuls’ food recovery means daily trucks travel to food donors such as retailers and then deliver the recovered food to local partner organizations.
“We continue to keep doing what we’re doing, frankly, at a higher cost when it comes to fuel,” Ash says. “We always have to recover food before we can distribute it. So, there’s a natural order to how we do things that we can do.”
While a partner organization might be closer to begin a route, trucks need to be filled first. It’s the same with organizations that donate food; if that location is further away but is an important source, it doesn’t make sense to eliminate that stop.
“If we have three stops in a row, we always have to start with food donors, and sometimes it may make the most sense to start with the food recipient,” Ash says. “But if we don’t have food on the truck yet, we can’t do that.”
Eliminating ‘Dead Miles’ and Rethinking Logistics
Thakkar says California Food Banks has also looked at creative and innovative ways to cover some of those food miles so the freight costs are lower. For example, if a truckload of produce goes to Texas, does any fresh produce from Texas need to come back to California?
“If this driver is doing dead miles, it’s going to increase the cost, right? Is there any way we can collaborate across the country to see how we avoid those dead miles, No. 1, which will bring down the rates if we did that because drivers are no longer going to have that empty miles driving back home,” she says. “They’re loaded back up on the truck, and then they get their freight cost and [that] really helps our peers as well to move food across.”
Another way, Thakkar says, is working with grower donors to move the food, which also helps keep freight costs down for the organization.
“It’s great for them as well because they have all this food,” she says. “How could they share it with us without increasing that cost? And that’s one of the biggest challenges, ... not just for us, but for them to move food to the retailers, because that’s costing them more money as well.”
As California Food Banks works with so many organizations to recover food, some have gone the extra mile to pick up food to help cut down on freight costs.
“We’re looking at 5 cents per pound per mile for diesel cost for moving food, but that’s sharply increasing week over week,” Thakkar says.
Vendors also have looked at how to minimize the impact of fuel surcharges, essentially opting not to take a profit, she adds.
“With the support of our carriers, our farmers and donors, we’re still moving food — not as fast as we did before with all the challenges that we have, but we’re working through it,” she says. “Our donors and farmers have their own fleet as well, and they’re working to see if they can build in that cost, that couple of pennies per pound per truck.”
Spoonfuls continues to recover more food year over year; Ash says as part of that growth, the organization continues to look for more donors and partners.
“We are certainly looking for opportunities to add more partners and to deliver both on the food donor side and the food recipient side,” Ash says. “We certainly are always looking for opportunities to make it as efficiently as possible so that we’re building things in a particular way.”
Other opportunities include re-depoting trucks to save on mileage in the morning, but Ash says the ever-growing need for food recovery means that the focus is more on helping organizations and continuing to grow the services of the organizations.
The operational decisions look at how best to add partners and donors in a way that works with existing routes and stops, Ash explains. Of course, it also means Spoonfuls has to try to plan for the unexpected as rising fuel costs today could become more unpredictable.
“We just have to do everything we can to take the increased costs into account as we’re looking at next year’s budget to communicate honestly with our funders,” Ash says. “This work is getting more expensive, but it’s also getting more urgent, which is why we don’t want to drop people from a route where we’re looking to do the opposite to find opportunities to add more when we can.”
Meeting Demand Amid SNAP Cuts
Thakkar says that with the higher cost of freight, excess often sits at a warehouse because it is moving slower at a retailer, which means donations have increased.
“We have amazing growers in California. They’re all coming together,” she says. “Whenever there is excess, they do reach out to us. They know exactly who to call, who to get through and make sure that food is being moved.”
California Food Banks has also asked its partner food banks to continue to budget for those higher freight costs, but that ends up eating into the organization’s buying power for food. She estimates that the organization will beat 2025’s record of 300 million pounds of food recovered, though it will take a little more logistics.
“We’re projecting to move the same amount or higher this year just because the food banks are still seeing that demand align with SNAP [Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program] cuts,” she says. “We’re finding innovative ways ... How can we do that? How can we move food at the cost that we were moving food with the freight and keep it low?”
Ash says as the need continues to grow in Massachusetts, Spoonfuls has committed to meeting the need in the community.
“We’re not cutting partners,” she says. “We’re not cutting routes. Our work on the road is the core of what we do.”
There is a bright spot. Ash says that despite economic challenges, she strongly believes there’s more food to be recovered. This includes beyond traditional grocery partners.
“Something that I hope comes out of stuff like this is that there are other donors that have food that think to start donating, who otherwise just may not have had a donation program,” Ash says. “There is still food to recover. I think there’s a lot of sources to recover that food from.”
