While people often use “food bank” and “food panty” interchangeably, the two are actually different types of organizations. As a food bank, we supply food to food pantries and other types of direct aid organizations – think food pantries, soup kitchens, schools, churches, and other organizations. We call these organizations our partner agencies.
Where does our food come from?
Care and Share Food Bank gets the food we provide to our partners from a variety of vendors and organizations. As a partner food bank of the Feeding America network, we have fantastic relationships with manufacturers (like Pepsi or General Mills) and retailers (like King Soopers, Walmart, and Target). Those organizations, along with farmers, the government, and community members provide food to Care and Share for free or at a discounted price. Our Distribution Centers in Pueblo, Colorado Springs, and Alamosa are specifically designed to receive and distribute millions of pounds of food each year – in our last fiscal year, we distributed over 23 million pounds of food to our neighbors throughout Southern Colorado!
So how does this work? Say a food manufacturer has a few hundred pounds of peanut butter that was meant to be distributed in Germany, but got sent to the United States. While that peanut butter can’t be sold in stores, we are able to transport that perfectly good peanut butter to one of our distribution centers, where we can repack the jars into orders for our partner agencies!
How do agencies receive their food?
Partners order food through an online portal called Agency Express. There, they can choose to order whatever foods we have available. In this case, they might order 5 cases of peanut butter, 3 cases of canned soup, and 2 sacks of potatoes. That order gets put together and then picked up by the agency at one of our facilities or delivered to them.
Then comes the final, and most impactful part of our work – our partner agencies are able to distribute that food directly to our neighbors in Southern Colorado and our neighbors go home knowing they have food to put on the table.
We are so proud to serve Southern Colorado and to partner with all our fantastic partner agencies to reach as many neighbors as we can. And we can’t do it alone – from volunteering to hosting a food drive, there are plenty of ways to get involved!
