Reduce Waste and Humiliation—Let Clients Assemble Their Own Food Boxes

The most revolutionary and most necessary of needed food pantry reforms is to let clients assemble their own food boxes. No other single reform makes more difference, is simpler or is more difficult to get pantries to actually do!

How this works

Ideally, food pantries set themselves up like little grocery stores with food shelves stocked with the biggest and best variety of goods, including food and non-food items—toothpaste, toilet paper and dish soap—that they have obtained from their local food bank or food rescue system.

Clients browse among the goods just as they would at a store. If popular items are available only in limited supply, it is perfectly okay for the pantry to put limits on how much or many of that item any one family can take. Otherwise, food pantries should permit clients to pick out what they want and need without further direction or interference from the food pantry’s staff.

Trusting clients helps end hunger

Are you reeling in incredulity at the idea of letting people take what they want? Research shows that the key to ending hunger is treating pantry clients with the same levels of trust and respect you would want to be shown if you were in their shoes.

Which style of service would you prefer?

When given these choices most people pick number 4, with a slight reservation: They would appreciate being given some idea of how much is fair and reasonable for them to take, because when given the opportunity to take as much as they want, most people won't take enough, being concerned that they may deprive some another family of the help they need.

Clients usually don’t select enough food

Pantries that have given out standardized food boxes, in part out of a fear that the poor are too greedy, irresponsible, dishonest or unscrupulous to be trusted, find that after switching to letting people pick their own food, these same clients are actually very nice people who care very much about the well-being of others in need and about “doing what is right.”

In fact, if left entirely to their own discretion, most food pantry clients will take significantly less help than they really need. This phenomenon is so widespread and such a problem that many client-shopping food pantries have eventually found themselves needing to employ some means of coaxing clients to take more than they otherwise might.

The most common of those systems is to do a quick assessment of how much help a family needs, then recommend to the client a certain number of pounds of goods to take.

For example, a family of four that needs a week’s worth of help could be directed to multiply four people by four pounds per day, which equals 16 pounds per day, multiplied by seven days, results in a total of 112 pounds. So they would be given a slip that says they should take 112 pounds of goods.

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