The donation will be distributed as grants to 16 local food banks that serve under-resourced communities experiencing high rates of food insecurity.

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<a href="https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america">As 1 in 8 people in the United States faces hunger,</a> Starbucks is committed to helping address the growing need for food assistance across the nation. Today, the company is announcing a $1.7 million donation to Feeding America to advance equitable access to nutritious food.

The equitable food access grants will be distributed to 16 local Feeding America member food banks located near <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/press/2020/starbucks-expands-commitment-in-underserved-communities-across-the-us/">Starbucks Community Stores</a>. The grants are designed to help food banks provide nutritious food to households with individuals who are Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) residing in communities experiencing high rates of food insecurity.

This announcement builds on $2.69 million invested in <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2020/food-banks-starbucks-rethink-solutions-to-address-root-causes-of-hunger/">food bank mobile pantry programs</a> since 2019, and $45 million overall invested in hunger relief nationwide.

“For the last 50 years and still today, Starbucks believes it is our role and responsibility to help strengthen the communities we serve, and in partnership with <a>Feeding America, </a>we are tackling hunger with a focus on equity,” said Camille Hymes, Starbucks vice president of community impact.

“The equitable food access grants are a unique opportunity to combine efforts with our Community Stores across the country, which are specifically designed to support historically under-resourced communities through local partnerships and economic opportunity, to increase access to nutritious food for people that need it most.”

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Since 2016, Starbucks has been committed to the fight against hunger through its innovative FoodShare program in partnership with Feeding America and other hunger-relief organizations and has donated, so far, nearly 34 million nourishing, ready-to-eat meals* to local food banks across the U.S. One hundred percent of all U.S. company-operated stores, almost 9,000 stores nationwide, are now participating in the FoodShare program. Starbucks has also announced a reinvestment of $100 million dollars in hunger relief initiatives over the next 10 years.

“Food is an absolutely essential building block for opportunity, whether it’s fueling success at school or work, or helping someone to stay healthy,” said Radha Muthiah, president and chief executive officer of the Capital Area Food Bank in Washington D.C., one of the Starbucks equitable food access grant recipients.

FoodShare started in 2016 after Starbucks partners (employees) advocated for a program that would allow stores to donate unsold food and distribute it to people facing hunger in communities across the U.S. In response to their call for action, working with Feeding America®, Starbucks invested in research and quality assurance testing to develop a program to safely donate nourishing food to people who face hunger.&nbsp;&nbsp;

<a href="https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/food-insecurity">Food insecurity</a>&nbsp;remains an urgent issue due to the economic impacts of COVID-19. As more people have turned to food banks to help feed their families, Feeding America®, estimates that more than <a href="https://www.feedingamerica.org/research/coronavirus-hunger-research">42 million people</a>, including 13 million children in the U.S., may experience food insecurity in 2021.&nbsp;This national crisis disproportionately affects BIPOC communities, with 21 percent of Black individuals experiencing food insecurity this year, compared to 11 percent of white individuals, according to Feeding America projections.

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“We’re grateful for partners like Starbucks,” said Muthiah, “whose support will enable us to continue learning from the individuals we serve about their needs and expand access to food and opportunity for more people across our region.”

*According to the USDA, 1.2 pounds of food is the equivalent to one meal.

Photos by Connor Surdi

The donation will be distributed as grants to 16 local food banks that serve under-resourced communities experiencing high rates of food insecurity.

Starbucks donates $1.7 million to Feeding America to support equitable access to food

Stories to inspire and nurture the human spirit

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One hundred percent of&nbsp;Starbucks company-operated&nbsp;stores in the U.S. are&nbsp;participating in the&nbsp;FoodShare&nbsp;program. Go with us on&nbsp;the&nbsp;journey of a&nbsp;donation box from&nbsp;a store&nbsp;in Los Angeles,&nbsp;through the&nbsp;food bank and into the hands of&nbsp;some of the&nbsp;people who need it&nbsp;the most.&nbsp;

LOS ANGELES – It’s 10:30 p.m. on a recent Tuesday night, and the cars are still stop-and-go in the drive-through line at the <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/press/2020/starbucks-opens-community-store-in-watts-neighborhood-of-la/">Starbucks Community Store</a> in Watts. Inside, Antonio Flores Sanchez, the store manager, is checking his inventory of perishable food.

Sandwiches, salads, pastries, wraps. Various protein boxes filled with vegetables, eggs, cheese and chicken. He rifles through them all, filling an orange tote box with unsold products.

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“When you’re on the receiving end, every bit counts,” Flores Sanchez says, walking the box to a refrigerator in the back and putting it inside.

This is where the story of a Starbucks FoodShare donation box begins. A story about all the people and groups who play a role in addressing something as big and complex as hunger. A story about Art Ortiz, a delivery driver, who knows the difference a refrigerated truck can make, and Liz Cervantes, from the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, who sees the scale of need every day.

It’s a story about how a box like this eventually ends up in the hands of a man named Eric Perkins, a cook, who transforms the ingredients every night into a hot meal for a few dozen men participating in a residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation program at the Long Beach Rescue Mission.

And it’s a story that happens thousands of times over, at every company-operated Starbucks in the United States.

FoodShare is Starbucks commitment, in partnership with Feeding America® and other hunger relief organizations, to making sure unsold food doesn’t go to waste. It aims to help address <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/hunger-relief/">food insecurity </a> as <a href="https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america">1 in 8 face hunger</a> in the U.S., and tries to help address some of the root causes of that hunger. To that end, Starbucks is announcing a commitment to reinvest $100 million into hunger relief over the next 10 years. This year alone, Starbucks is making a $1.7 million donation to Feeding America to advance equitable access to nutritious food among households with individuals who are Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) residing in communities experiencing high rates of food insecurity, such as Watts.

FoodShare also represents an exercise in the power of scale. What’s the impact of one box? In Los Angeles County alone, 592 Starbucks stores together donate around 2,000 boxes a week – about 1.2 million pounds of food so far this year. Now, scale that by almost 9,000 – the number of company-operated U.S. stores. Since 2016, Starbucks has donated close to 34 million meals* through FoodShare.

"Rescuing our unsold food is table-stakes. I'm very proud of what we've been able to accomplish to scale FoodShare to 100% of our stores,” says Jane Maly, a Starbucks director who has been instrumental in FoodShare’s growth. “I'm excited for what's next, and how we can consider using our scale, network, and expertise to move from feeding those experiencing hunger, to also addressing some of the root causes of hunger."

For Flores Sanchez, the Watts store manager, his part in the story feels very personal. He grew up in a family that lived paycheck to paycheck, and he ate free breakfast and lunch at school. He worked in retail for about 15 years before joining Starbucks, where he now helps lead and organize social-impact programs in his community.&nbsp;

During the pandemic, Flores Sanchez, 35, distributed food alongside a local youth mentorship organization. Next month, he’ll start collecting supplies to make and distribute hygiene kits. In the future, once society starts to reconnect, he dreams of a dental care awareness event inside the spacious meeting room that’s the centerpiece of the company’s <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2020/starbucks-continues-to-strengthen-communities-opens-17th-community-store/">community-store concept</a>.

“My parents, I saw how much they struggled, I saw how much we didn’t have,” Flores Sanchez says. “If you can donate this food to somebody who needs it … they can focus their money on something else. That’s going to help give them a better life. That’s my drive.

“I get paid to set up volunteer events. I get paid to connect with community leaders and provide support. I get paid to nominate local organizations for grants. I get paid to figure out what’s possible. Don’t think the only thing I can do is make coffee.”

Next stop: Art Ortiz, the delivery driver

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It’s 1 p.m. the next day, and a delivery truck has just arrived at one of the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank’s warehouses, a 90,000-square foot storage and distribution center that processes four million pounds of food donations every week. Art Ortiz, the driver, waves out the window and backs his refrigerated box truck into one of the empty bays.

Starbucks uses an innovative backhaul model, which means the same drivers who drop off the supplies at each Starbucks store also pick up the donation boxes and bring them back to a central warehouse, unlocking efficiencies and possibilities that didn’t exist before.

Like Ortiz. One driver with one truck, who started his shift that day at 5 a.m. at a warehouse in nearby La Puente. He organized all the FoodShare boxes that came in the night before – including the one Flores Sanchez filled in Watts – stacked them 42 to a pallet and then wrapped each bundle for travel. The numbers add up. He hauls about 50,000 pounds of Starbucks food to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank every week.

“I used to work at a gas station and people would come in and ask for food all the time. I hated seeing people hungry,” says Ortiz, who’s been a FoodShare driver for two years, first in Washington state and now in Los Angeles. “So I'm happy that this food is going to somebody and not just being thrown away, because there's a lot of food that gets thrown away.”

Born and raised in Southern California, Ortiz, now 40, comes from a family of truck drivers. When he started delivering the Starbucks food, he found he enjoyed talking to the people at the food banks and liked the sense of purpose.

He watches as the workers unload pallets off his truck and give him back the stacks of empty boxes from the previous day’s delivery. “I love being able to help. I love being a part of providing meals to people who need it,” Ortiz says. “There’s no reason someone should go hungry with all the food that’s around.”&nbsp;

Liz Cervantes, Los Angeles Regional Food Bank

Another important number in the fight against hunger: 34-35 degrees Fahrenheit.

That’s the temperature inside the huge walk-in refrigerator at the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank where the Starbucks FoodShare boxes are all stored after they arrive, the same temperature inside the back of Ortiz’s box truck, the same temperature back at the warehouse in La Puente.

Perishable donated food – especially fresh, healthy options that agencies like to distribute and that families like to eat – needs to be kept that cold to prevent spoilage.

But that’s where it gets tricky, says Liz Cervantes, the food bank’s director of Agency Relations and Product Acquisitions, who has worked there for 19 years. Refrigeration is an equity issue, she says. &nbsp;

Nearly 700 smaller, local agencies work with the food bank to get food free of charge for their own programs, whether it’s a larger sub-agency or a kids’ backpack program or a senior-citizen home delivery service. But for them, Cervantes explains, “the largest challenges are transportation, number one, and then cold storage, number two. Refrigerated trucks and vans, commercial freezers, they’re expensive.”

She estimates that less than 200 of those partner agencies have the capability to keep their food cold, which means the rest have to borrow trucks, or use an SUV or the back of a pickup truck and hope for the best in the California heat, or not take fresh, perishable food at all. And these agencies are often the ones serving the people who need fresh food the most.

Even if they can somehow get the food there, smaller agencies don’t have a refrigerated storage space big enough on site – or the money to buy it – which is why Starbucks has also invested in buying refrigerated vans for hunger-relief organizations, and on innovative delivery methods like mobile food pantries.

The pandemic has only increased the need. According to the food bank’s estimates, about 300,000 people per month were serviced by the organization before the pandemic. Now, it’s at about 900,000 per month.&nbsp;

“I would say in 2020, there were definitely more people who needed food assistance, who never needed food assistance in the past, nor did they ever think they were going to need food assistance,” says Cervantes, 48. “Because of the pandemic, I think people are more aware that anybody can fall through the cracks.

“There are families who are behind on bills, who lost work, who are going to need food assistance for a couple more months, if not years, and we can be that backbone.”&nbsp;

It’s Thursday afternoon at the Long Beach Rescue Mission, and the kitchen is hot. Large, flat pans with 150 servings of chicken have been baking since noon. That’s when Eric Perkins started preparing dinner for the people who live in the mission as part of a rehabilitation program, or just come by at mealtime to eat.

The day before, he’d driven up to the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank to pick up the delivery – 250 pounds of orange Starbucks FoodShare boxes. Someone from the mission drives up five times a week to bring back the donated FoodShare items.

When the delivery arrives back in Long Beach, the kitchen staff opens the packaging and separates the food into like piles. The sandwiches will be reheated and passed out at breakfast or lunch. The hard-boiled eggs, cheese and greens from various ready-to-eat boxes are saved in a fridge until there’s enough to feed everybody. The greens will make a big salad soon.

On this day, Perkins’ focus is on the snap peas and carrots that come from the Starbucks protein boxes. It’ll make the perfect side to his chicken, donated from a local grocery store chain, seasoned with a red rub recipe he refuses to divulge. Usually, he can find enough peas and carrots to feed everybody if he waits through three days of deliveries. Sometimes he goes big with a brown-butter glaze; today it’s a simple sauté in butter.

Born in New Jersey, Perkins, 52, was placed with foster families at a young age, and as a teenager became addicted to crack and alcohol. As an adult, he lost his job after a failed drug test. He was clean for seven years, scared straight after he started coughing up black phlegm, but then relapsed after his brother died. He was in a bad place.

“The last week before I came here, I was in a hotel and decided I wasn’t ready to die,” Perkins remembers. “So I came here to sign up for the program. I didn’t want to die.”

He got clean the second time, in 2019, through the mission’s New Life Program – a strict one-year residential program for drug and alcohol addiction with wrap around services such as legal aid, education, classes on interpersonal relationships, work therapy, daily chapel services and bed checks. And he impressed the staff enough to get hired on as a cook after he graduated. &nbsp;

Around 4:30 p.m., three volunteers show up to help serve dinner. After hugs and handshakes, Perkins directs them to their stations behind a small service counter, next to heaping piles of rice, beans, chicken and snap peas and carrots. Some of the food is sent across the street to the Lydia House, where women and children who receive the mission’s services live, and some is reserved for the walk-up crowd who’ll come by later that night, just to eat.

Nick Roberts, the mission’s volunteer program coordinator and another graduate of the New Life Program, leads announcements for the 40 or so men in the room. He welcomes several who recently joined the program, assigns a few others after-dinner tasks, and then talks excitedly about the big half-marathon coming up this weekend. He’s the coach of the mission’s running team; it’s part therapy, part reward.

After a short prayer, the men start to line up in front of Perkins, who greets them one at a time, with a smile or a joke or a bit of conversation. He hands over a hot plate of food to each one across the counter.

“This basically is what the program is, feeding the community,” Perkins says later, after the food’s all gone. “For me, this food, it means a chance, to try to give them something to enjoy. I don’t just say, ‘Here take it.’ I try to make it look different, make it taste different. Nourishment. I know what it’s like to be hungry. So someone coming in here, I just try to treat them with dignity and respect in the best way I can.”

*According to the USDA, 1.2 pounds of food is the equivalent to one meal.

Starbucks barista in black ballcap shows back of black FoodShare t-shirt

Go with us on the journey of a donation box from a store in Los Angeles, through the food bank and into the hands of some of the people who need it the most.

Meet four people on the journey of Starbucks FoodShare donations box

‘This food, it means a chance’: Meet four people on the journey of Starbucks FoodShare donations box

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The Arkansas Delta – which runs along the western edge of the mighty Mississippi River – is one of the poorest areas in the country. But it’s not just the statistics about the median income level or the annual food insecurity rankings that makes poverty there so discouraging, says Rhonda Sanders, Chief Executive Officer of the Arkansas Foodbank.

It’s also the younger generations who are leaving for college or for opportunities in bigger cities like Dallas, Atlanta and Little Rock. It’s the steady hammering of boarded-up windows signaling the demise of another local small business. It’s the rural hospitals that are shutting down during COVID-19, maybe never to come back.

“So what you have left is those who can’t move, who can’t go anywhere else, often the very elderly, those with disabilities that make it difficult to hold a job,” Sanders says. “So how do you stop that cycle when you have devolved to a certain point of need? That’s the struggle you have in the Delta.

“It is very, very difficult and it’s hard to watch and it’s hard to figure out what to do. At the <a href="https://arkansasfoodbank.org/">Arkansas Foodbank</a>, we’ve had to look at our role in the Delta very differently.”

Food banks across the country are facing surging need. Feeding America®, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, based in Chicago, estimates that 54 million Americans could go hungry in 2020, including potentially 18 million children, in large part due to the economic insecurity caused by COVID-19. That’s up from an estimated 37 million in previous years.

But some food banks across the country also see COVID-19 as an opportunity, not only to figure out new ways to ramp up distribution, but to reimagine and rethink some of the fundamentals of their business: how do you actually solve hunger, once and for all?

“It’s easy to look at food banking in a supply and demand kind of way, and we’ve built a relatively efficient system to get food to people who need it,” says Jessica Jelinski, Vice President of Equitable Access at <a href="https://www.feedingamerica.org/">Feeding America</a>. “But just getting food to people doesn’t address why people need the food in the first place. Food insecurity exists because there are deep systemic issues that have prevented people in this country from opportunities to succeed.”

Starbucks, which has a global social impact team focused on helping fight hunger, is committed to partnering with and working alongside hunger-relief organizations to find solutions. The company invests heavily in the <a href="https://stories.starbucks.com/stories/2019/20-million-people-fed-through-starbucks-foodshare-program/">Starbucks FoodShare</a> program, which currently rescues food from more than 6,200 U.S. stores to donate to food banks across the country, and is also doubling down on investments into successful long-term strategies like mobile pantries, which help overcome transportation and access barriers by bringing food to families where they are.

This month, Starbucks is giving an additional $1 million to invest in mobile food pantry programs for 13 Feeding America member food banks across the country, including the Arkansas Foodbank, part of an ongoing three-year financial commitment to hunger-relief organizations showing impact and innovation.

“How do we get closer to the root problems that cause hunger? The solve isn’t that we just keep feeding people,” says Jane Maly, Starbucks director, Global Social Impact, who oversees the company’s work around hunger. “We’re really in it to address hunger in a much bigger way. The word I come back to is ‘disruption.’ The old way of doing things is not going to cut it anymore.”

Shifting the attention to nutrition, economic development and overcoming barriers

One of the ways food banks have shifted focus is to turn their attention to nutrition.

“Are we genuinely nourishing people or are we contributing to bigger public health issues?” asks Emily De Maria, Chief Program Officer at the <a href="https://www.centraltexasfoodbank.org/">Central Texas Food Bank</a> in Austin, a Feeding America member food bank and Starbucks mobile food pantry grant recipient. “We’ve always asked people to donate healthy food, but now we’re putting a stake in the ground, reframing hunger as a health issue.”

That means establishing a formal nutrition policy and setting strict goals around collecting and distributing produce, while limiting high-sodium, high-sugar products like canned goods, soda or candy that might only exacerbate pre-existing health conditions in certain communities, like diabetes, asthma or hypertension.

It means more classes teaching people how to cook nutritiously, and programs, for example, where food pantries have been built onsite at local medical facilities and clinics, so doctors can write prescriptions for fruits and vegetables that can be filled immediately, or medically tailored food boxes can be built specifically for diabetic clients.

Mobile pantries, essentially refrigerated vehicles that deliver food directly to neighborhood distribution sites, can help. They bring fresh, refrigerated or frozen healthy items like fruits, vegetables, dairy, meats and other proteins to areas that don’t have grocery stores or food pantries. For some people in impoverished rural areas, the drive to a food pantry is more than an hour away. Even in urban areas, traditional grocery stores don’t operate in some low-income neighborhoods.

When Sanders, the Arkansas Foodbank CEO, thinks about the Delta and the poverty there, she imagines a place-based solution – not only healthy food and mobile food pantries, but also economic investment in the community, in the form of jobs and internships, partnerships with banks around financial literacy and advocacy of federal programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (formerly food stamps).

“We do have a good group of organizations and nonprofits that are standing shoulder to shoulder on this, trying to improve the safety net, trying to improve the economic well-being of our communities,” says Sanders, who has spent decades advocating for healthier communities. “There’s no way we could do this ourselves.”

Food banks can play the role of convener in these kinds of communities, says Jelinski with Feeding America, which plans to pilot a similar economic development “community accelerator” program in the Delta region, home to some of the poorest counties in America. People will show up for the food, she says, and that provides a chance to address the other issues.

Food banks across the country are also trying to address other barriers using technology and creative partnerships. Some are experimenting with platforms that allow individuals to log in, select what they want and pick food up at a pre-scheduled time, in order to keep the experience private and reduce the possible shame of waiting outside in line. In Austin, the Central Texas Food Bank is partnering with a grocery chain and the local bus and transit system to directly deliver food to the area’s rapidly growing population of homebound seniors, house by house.

Disproportionate hunger in diverse communities; meeting the need in New Orleans

Troy James grew up in Sunset, Louisiana, about two hours west of New Orleans. His mom was a school principal, and before that, a special-education teacher. He remembers how she’d sometimes take a skillet to school, to cook breakfast for her students.

“How can you keep them focused in the classrooms, in life, when they’re just thinking about where they can get their next meal?” James asks. “I’m blessed because I haven’t missed a meal. To realize how important that is to the health of a child… the things that we take for granted.”

Food is a passion for James, which makes what’s going on in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward all the more heartbreaking for him. A Starbucks licensed store district manager in New Orleans, he’s seen the predominantly Black working-class neighborhood suffering through the COVID-19 pandemic. Many people have lost their service-industry jobs. Many families are struggling to find enough food.

A few months ago, he decided to do something about it. He pulled together the connections he had: relationships with Target, which operate licensed Starbucks stores; <a href="http://www.libertyskitchen.org/">Liberty’s Kitchen</a>, a nonprofit mentorship program for youth which James has been volunteering with for more than a decade; and the Starbucks Black Partner Network, which challenged itself to find solutions during the recent civil unrest. He reached out to <a href="https://no-hunger.org/">Second Harvest Food Bank</a> of New Orleans, another Starbucks mobile food pantry grant recipient, which he’d worked with before, and the Metropolitan Human Services District, which pledged to show up with healthcare resources.

The end result was a resource distribution event at Franklin Avenue Baptist Church on a rainy morning in late July where volunteers, including New Orleans councilwoman Cyndi Nguyen, passed out 1,600 boxes of food, each designed to feed a family of four for two weeks, 800 COVID-19 sanitizing kits and 400 back-to-school kits in a backpack. Liberty’s Kitchen bought the school supplies with a $7,500 Target community grant.

“When we arrived at 6:30 in the morning, 2 ½ hours before the start, there were cars lined up for a block,” James says. “At that point, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that we would achieve our goal of giving away all the resources at our disposal. That was juxtaposed by the painful acknowledgement of the large number of people in need. I could have never calculated the personal responsibility and humble joy I would feel in seeing the vision come to life.”

The event was such a big success, the Starbucks Black Partner Network plans to use it as a model for similar events in Akron, Ohio, and Southern California.

Jelinski, of Feeding America, says the recent attention given to racial justice in the country has also opened up the opportunity for food banks to think about the intersection of hunger and race, and to try and understand and address the systemic issues that create more obstacles for some communities of color.

For example, hunger in the Lower Ninth Ward is affected by several factors not present in more wealthy communities. It’s a <a href="https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/american-south/2020/05/19/coronavirus-new-orleans-food-desert-ninth-ward-food-insecurity/5184730002/">food desert</a>, defined by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a low-income area with at least 500 residents and no grocery store within one mile, which leads to poor eating options, which in turn contributes to health issues. Also, decades of redlining – government-backed policies that prevented Black people from securing home loans and financial resources – have <a href="https://www.nola.com/gambit/news/article_215014ce-0c15-5917-b773-8d1d2fdaa655.html">contributed to generational instability and negative economic and community health outcomes</a>.

The difference in median incomes between Black and white families in New Orleans is stark, as much as $40,000 according to estimates. Overall, African American households in the U.S. <a href="https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/publications/94849/err-270.pdf?v=963.1">are more than twice as likely</a> to face hunger as white households.&nbsp;

“I’m speaking as a Black man that didn’t grow up in a community like this, but has been very much a part of it,” James says. “These communities need empathy, these people need love. If we can do those two things without casting blame or disparaging anyone, then we’ll solve these problems. We don’t know who’s going to grow up and be the next inventor, our next president, our next leader, if we give them a little hope.”

As the number of Americans without enough to eat is projected to increase due to COVID-19, food banks are looking at ways to both respond to the surging need and examine some of the deeper issues behind hunger.

Food banks, Starbucks rethink solutions to address root causes of hunger

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