Creating a more consistent shopping experience with twice the variety
A colorful community mural greets more shoppers than ever at the Fresh Harvest Food Pantry in Hudson. Kids have a space to color and snack, and the shopping floor is bright and spacious.
But when Anamarie Schell became pantry manager in October 2025, she was concerned about a lack of food variety on the shelves. The site had plenty of backstock, but disorganized storage made reordering hard and restocking harder. Shelves ran thin, orders were duplicated and food sometimes expired before reaching the 1,600 households the pantry serves each month.
FFEN staff reached out to Schell to welcome her to the role. The conversation led to an on-site assessment of the pantry and a doubling of 47 shelf-stable items to 94 options.
“Every family is different and everyone has different needs, having more options allows us to meet more of those needs,” Schell said.
The changes came through a FFEN-guided reorganization. Katie Bull, FFEN’s Director of Programs, said grouping food into categories like fruit and vegetables, baking and cooking, proteins, grains, and snacks, created room for more items per section and gave volunteers clear direction on what to stock when shelves ran low.
The recommendation grew out of the on-site assessment where FFEN staff observed daily operations and talked with staff and volunteers about ordering, distribution, food delivery, backroom organization, sorting, stocking and merchandising.
“It’s a chance to see what’s happening on the floor and behind the scenes to gather input for short and long-term recommendations,” Bull said.
Like many Midwest food shelves, Fresh Harvest is experiencing increased demand. They were rotating backstock onto the floor to provide different options for shoppers each week, but it created extra work for volunteers and inconsistency for shoppers. The layout itself created bottlenecks and small shifts to produce islands and bread shelving opened the flow for more shoppers at once.
“We needed help with stocking and shopper flow and making things more efficient,” Schell said.
Today, fresh produce anchors the center of the pantry. Refrigerators house milk, eggs and rescued deli items, still safe to eat but that can no longer be sold. Freezers hold chicken, beef, and fish.
“The combination of fresh and canned/boxed and frozen items give families what they need to make meals today and in the days that follow,” Bull said.
By rotating older backstock out first and tracking inventory more closely, Schell now orders smaller quantities more often and fills gaps through targeted food drives, asking for condiments one month and cereal the next. Those changes along with a shift in how they provide things like sugar and oil have freed up more money for protein purchases.
Before: Shelves were relatively full but contained a lot of the same item despite a variety of product in the backstock. Volunteers rotated items from the backstock to the shelves but there wasn’t clear direction on what goes where, making it difficult to restock. The rotation of items reduced consistency for shoppers.
Before:
One day transformation: Staff and volunteers from Fresh Harvest Pantry worked with FFEN staff to unload the shelves, categorize product in a different way and place items back on the shelves, doubling the variety using product already at the food shelf. New signage now welcomes shoppers to choose up to a specific number of items per category.
After: The shelves are full and stocked with dozens of different items in each category, providing more choice to shoppers. The produce area sits front and center and by moving a bread rack, shoppers now have a clear line of sight to all the pantry has to offer. The change also reduced bottlenecks, allowing more people to shop at once.
