For three years, Pam Holland has been greeting guests at Salvation Army Noble Corps.
While she answered phones and said hello to visitors, her job slowly morphed into managing the food shelf, which had been run solely by volunteers.
“If no volunteer signed up, then the front desk person did it,” she said.
Appointments were every half hour. The site was open a half day on Tuesdays and Fridays, all day Thursdays. The wait to shop the food shelf stretched to six weeks; people could come in between for a packed emergency box.
“It was nuts,” Holland said.
With a few changes, and help from FFEN’s Strategic Food Sourcing Analysis, a “health check” for food shelves, the site has been intentional about what comes next. They’ve doubled the number of people who can shop the shelves in a day, cut costs by leaning on free and low-cost food streams, and brought the shopping wait down to four weeks.
“The report helped me see what the higher-cost items are that we normally order. It helped me see trends,” Holland said.
This is her third report and consultation with FFEN. One recurring thread: the different streams of food coming into the food shelf. The site relies heavily on food rescue — food from convenience and grocery stores that’s still safe to eat but can no longer be sold. That stream, FFEN Executive Director Kate Burggraff said, is highly variable, and it’s fresh, perishable food that needs to reach shoppers fast.
The report showed a gap between how much low-cost and free food the site was ordering from the food bank and how much it could be. Once Holland saw the gap, she started ordering more regularly — enough to balance out what she wasn’t getting through rescue.
“Some of our folks have health issues, so making sure they get dairy, eggs, milk, and good proteins and produce is super important,” Holland said.
Fresh tomatoes, onions, potatoes, mangoes, red peppers, plantains, lemons, limes, and bagged salads now greet guests alongside the refrigerated offerings. Holland has shifted from boxed meal items toward grains — couscous, quinoa, grits. She pays closer attention to what shoppers actually take off the shelves, and she knows Halal meat and fish matter to her shoppers and the numbers back it up.
They’ve hired a part-time pantry associate to run the food shelf floor and work with volunteers, and moved appointments from every 30 minutes to every 15. Together, those changes let Salvation Army Noble Food Shelf double its capacity — now 45 to 50 households a week.
The report also caught a gap between the weight of emergency food boxes leaving the site and what the site had assumed. When Holland started, they gave out 100 boxes a week; now it’s 145. Each box holds nearly 60 pounds of shelf-stable goods, milk, eggs, meat, bread, produce. The site had been estimating them at roughly half that.
Getting the weight right mattered for budgeting. When Holland started, she didn’t know the cost per person to provide food. Now she tracks it regularly and hands it to her fundraising team — a way to show donors exactly how far their dollar goes.
It’s changed the shelves, too.
“I see where my money is going, toward the most important foods, so I can balance things better,” she said. “Having that data really helped me make better decisions.”
She’s also found it useful to see how her site stacks up against statewide and regional numbers from FFEN.
“I want that information so I’m not operating in a vacuum,” she said. “In some areas we might be a little better, or a little worse — it’s not a bad thing, but it might be something I take a look at and work on.”
With support from FFEN the food shelf:
- Revealed where money was actually going
- Identified opportunities to source free and low-cost food
- Corrected a cost-per-person budgeting figure
- Could access key regional and statewide benchmarks for operations
