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. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2020 Oct 1.
Published in final edited form as: J Acad Nutr Diet. 2019 Jun 28;119(10):1653–1665. doi: 10.1016/j.jand.2019.04.023

Table 2.

Strategies for nutrition-focused food banking as identified through qualitative interviews with food bank executive leaders (n 30), including illustrative quotes, The Foodbanking Research to Enhance the Spread of Healthy Foods (FRESH-Foods) Study, 2015-2017

Strategy Interviews Cited Illustrative Quotes
Building Healthier Food Inventory

Focused grant-writing and donor communications n 25 ‘From a fundraising perspective, we’re tackling all the fresh fruits and vegetables. We’ve got some donors who are really interested in supporting that. A couple of foundations who’ve made significant gifts on an annual basis to help us distribute more produce. We’ve been growing our produce distribution about a million pounds each year.’
Nutrition-focused metrics n 14 ‘We follow something called the CHOP Rating System which is a system designed by the Pittsburgh Food Bank… We set an internal goal every year that 80% of what goes out the door is a rank 1 or a 2. Last year we achieved 85 [percent] so we’re very, very focused on putting out the most nutritious food that we can because we know the impact it has.’
Nutrition policies n 5 (donation refusal guidelines) ‘We actually have adapted a pretty far-reaching healthy food and beverage policy which speaks both to foods that we will not accept and do not intend to distribute, notably candy and sugar-sweetened beverages as well as some specific goals.’
n 7 (purchasing guidelines) ‘We would never buy anything like that [candy or sodas]. No, never, no. We are very careful on how we spend the money that we spend.’
Perishable foods committee n 1 ‘That’s probably a best practice, too. I don’t think about it that way. It’s just something that we do, but it has been one of the keys to our success. It’s a very cross-functional team. It’s agency services, operations, it’s food solicitors, it’s our mobile pantry coordinators. It’s our nutritionist. There are 10 people on that team and it meets religiously every week. We track our perishable product distribution by source, by distribution method, every week.’

Enhancing Healthy Food Access, Storage, and Distribution Capacity for Partner Programs

Provision of cold storage to partner agencies n 11 ‘We have had a cold storage program so we provide industrial coolers and freezers for member agency partners so that they can accept and distribute more perishable food.’
Partner notification when fresh produce is available n 9 ‘I have over 80 different pantries that I can call and have this product distributed. Like yesterday, like I said, we distributed over 80,000 pounds, and it’s just calling those pantries. Believe me, when you have fresh produce, they come in like little ants.’
Tier partner agencies n 6 ‘We have in our top tier, agencies that are high capacity and fully capable and chomping at the bit for more fresh produce and more other things. Part of the definition of being in that top tier is around really embracing nutrition and produce strategies. Second tier, organizations in the middle. They want to get there but there is a physical capacity constraint or there’s maybe a human capital constraint. Then, the bottom tier which those are low capacity, probably will never move out.’
“Produce drop” coordinated with partner agency distribution n 6 ‘They [partner agencies] all book their refrigerator, the mobile refrigerator, in connection to their distributions, 100% produce. They combine that with what they pick up from the warehouse which tends to be all non-perishable and they’re doing that out of their church. And then you [clients] get your food box, now you go by the refrigerator and you get all the produce and you take it home. If an agency said I’d like to take more produce, I just don’t have the space, we would say we’ve solved that problem for you.’
‘We’ll tell a pantry that we’re going to come out and, as part of their overall food distribution that day, we’re going to do a produce distribution as well. That way it couples and it leverages the time that they have with their clients.’
“Just-in-time” produce drops n 5 ‘We have volunteer produce drivers who everyday deliver fresh produce just in time to pantries they are serving. Your food pantry is going to be open from 11:00 to 1:00, our volunteer shows up at 10am and gives you 5 boxes of fresh produce.’
Central location produce drop n 4 ‘We have purchased a renovated freight container, shipping container like you see on the ships…We’re putting a Thermos King unit on it so it’s totally refrigerated. I have a partner agency … that has the capability to handle it. What we’re going to do is we’re going to put that shipping container at this partner agency. We’re going to take 12,000 pounds of fresh produce twice a week and then he’s going to contribute to partner agencies in his area.’
Fruit and vegetable visibility at time of order pickup n 3 ‘Then we’ve tried to put [fresh produce] outside where the agencies pick up so that they can see it, [in contrast to when]…it was stored in the cooler and in the back and the agencies didn’t know it was there. The goal is to really have it visible and have the agencies who are picking up take a look at it, talk to them about it, and then we can just add it to their order.’

Community-Based Nutrition Education

Nutrition education n 19 ‘I think the best practice for us… [is] we have a full-time staff person and nutritionist that goes out to the agencies every day. She does about 12 training sessions a month with clients [and] with the member agencies, to talk about the benefits of fresh produce so that when we get it people know that it’s available, and they also get it with menus on how to use it, recipes.’
‘Doing the nutrition classes with the kids has worked really well. We’re able to show them that when they’re with mom and dad at the grocery store and mom says you can pick something, don’t pick the bag of chips. Pick the orange. Pick the apple. It will taste better. It’s fresher. Probably that would be one of our best practices is doing that.’
Cooking component n 16 ‘We blanket the state and I don’t know if you are familiar with that [nutrition education] program but it’s teaching people to cook their meals but it also teaches people how to shop. We have our culinary training which also, outside of producing meals, is teaching folks in class even how to give them the opportunity to experience other produce they may not have access to.’
‘We used our [nutrition education] program to provide some recipes for our clients and the community partners so they know how to prepare eggplant. Now, whereas before, eggplant, kale, those sorts of vegetables would sit on the shelf because people wouldn’t know how to cook them. Now they know how to cook them so they are going off the shelf.’

Expanding Community Partnerships and Intervention Settings for Healthy Food Distribution

Community

Mobile direct distribution by food bank n 20 ‘One of the biggest ways we’re distributing fresh produce is through this program that we call our mobile pantry program. We identify under-served areas in the community or create partners like healthcare partners. We’ll go in to that community in partnership with another non-profit or community group once a month… We bring in, essentially, a truck load of fresh produce by the pallet.’
‘Distributing directly to clients I think is an easier model… because you can go into specific areas, food desert areas. You can go into communities that are low income communities or housing areas and with little notice or not much pre-planning if you have something-if you find out today that, say it’s Monday, that on Wednesday you are going to have a variety [of produce…]. I think that’s a more effective, quicker, safer way [than having agencies pick up fresh produce].’
Community health fairs n 3 ‘…We have representation from everybody if we’re doing something for an outreach, if we’re doing a mobile distribution. We have the colleges there, somebody from the hospital is there because we’re usually doing A1C testing [for diabetes] for people who are … [receiving] SNAP outreach, we have health navigators, it’s everybody. If we’re there, we’re investing our time, we want to get as much accomplished [as possible].’

Healthcare

Healthy food distribution at a healthcare site or produce prescription programs n 10 ‘The docs there are being trained to say, “Don’t forget nutritious food is critical to your health. The food bank is here. Take some produce before you go.” We have this prescription that looks like it’s prescription pads… for a doctor or a nurse or anyone in the healthcare to give out this essentially says, “Fresh or nutritious food is vital to your health. Call the… Food Bank health center to get connected.”’
‘For this pilot, they’ll be also screening for diet-related chronic conditions, specifically high blood pressure and diabetes. The doctor will then refer the patient to the client navigator that is on site and part of their system. That navigator will connect them with all kinds of resources, one of them being a prescription to our twice monthly mobile food distribution that will happen at the clinic. When we receive a prescription from a client, we’ll then kind of document the identifying information about who they are, the product that they get and feed that back into that systems data systems so that they can track health outcomes.’

Schools

Direct distribution to students and families n 9 ‘We take the produce to 9 high need elementary schools. Right now, we’re assisting about 7,300 children and their families because we bring enough produce to the school for them to take home for their families to use.’
‘It’s our healthier version of the backpack… Farm Fresh Fridays is a sack of produce that kids get that when they go home from school, they get that and they also get a dose of nutritional education.’
Feeding programs outside of school day n 3 ‘My main experience with that [client demand] is the summer feeding program. We do produce specifically for that program as well. The kids were always excited about it. They actually, we’d send bags and they could take it home with them.’
Feeding programs during school day n 3 ‘…We partnered with [our county’s] school system and distributed to every school. It was part of their schools’ ordering process so they would order through us what fruits and vegetables they needed and then we would deliver it to them weekly. The processing plant will allow the schools to have a variety… I’m talking beets, things that they didn’t have time to chop the heads off and slice and dice. We’ll be able to do that for them and then prepare it in a way that they need it because their school budgets have been cut.’
Advocacy efforts n 2 ‘Just the food that they are feeding these kids, from the school districts, is ridiculous… I was actually up in [the state capitol] trying to do some lobbying because we have a local chef who has transformed school lunch for the private schools… It really is no more expensive and his menus are phenomenal. We actually then put it into the… school districts and it was amazing, and the kids loved it.’