Pantry direct: A transformative supply chain for reducing food insecurity

The food bank, a nonprofit, humanitarian organization, recovers charitable food donations from retail stores via collaborative relationships. We demonstrate that decentralized supply chains enable local partnerships and drive value creation via increased exchange of products and services that also better align with community needs. Our supply chain intervention resulted in a reduction in waste disposal costs for the retailer and a greater supply of food for the food bank. We study the private–public partnership (PPP) in retail food recovery in two successive phases. The first exploratory phase incorporates qualitative data from key informants at multiple Feeding America partners across the United States. The second phase was a researcher-led supply chain intervention involving multiple stakeholders and executed with our partner food bank. Our intervention, Pantry Direct, represents a transition in the PPP to a decentralized, community network. It shifts the pickup responsibility for retail food recovery to a purely volunteer workforce at the pantry. Retail store management noticed lower pickup service reliability; however, more frequent interactions between food pantry volunteers and retail store employees improved communication, which overshadowed the limitations of the volunteer workforce. Owing to several factors, the gain in PPP performance was not universal. Among the five retail stores that participated in the supply chain intervention, two increased food donations and two others decreased food waste. The Pantry Direct model is transformative in the fight against food insecurity, as increased volume (and quality) of retail food donations enabled downstream pantries to provide end clients with more adequate, consistent, or appropriate access to food.