Jennifer Aakre has spent a lifetime managing and providing food to those around her.
Growing up, her parents ran a grocery store, where she started working at age 10 — through college and into her adult life. Later, as a science teacher, she kept a bowl of snacks in her classroom. Students could grab what they needed, when they needed it.
“If kids didn’t get breakfast, they weren’t going to learn as well. Even if they did get breakfast, kids eat all the time,” she said. “Food is one of those basic things. If people don’t have access to it, it affects every area of their life.”
In November, she took over as executive director of the Bemidji Community Food Shelf. The first two months were a blur. She stepped into an ongoing conversation about where the site sourced its food — whether to rely more on free and low-cost product from the food bank, or buy more directly from a discount grocery wholesaler.
“I thought, we just need more data. As somebody with a science background, if you don’t have data, you don’t have anything,” Aakre said.
Right around the time her food shelf needed clarity, Aakre came across old copies of FFEN’s Strategic Food Sourcing Analysis — a kind of health check for food shelves.
“I didn’t completely understand what an FSA was at first, but I really liked it,” Aakre said. “It just opened my eyes to the possibilities of where we could get our food.”
Her goal: fuller shelves and more consistent offerings of fresh produce, meat, dairy, and eggs — the foods a survey of 10,000 food shelf shoppers, one FFEN helped lead, says they want most.
“I want people to feel like they have a really good idea of what they’re going to get when they come here,” she said.
Now, with shopper numbers up and donations down, Aakre is using the report to be intentional about her food budget. She and her food ordering manager sat down with all the previous reports, page by page, and found their biggest costs were cooking and baking staples.
“How do you make good decisions without that information?” she said.
With that in hand, she and her team could plan what to scale back so they could offer more of what shoppers actually want — planning targeted food drives to replace the shelf-stable items they used to buy, and exploring alternate sources on FFEN’s recommendation.
“We talked about shifting priorities a little bit, to have more desired items on a regular basis,” she said. “It took a little bit — people don’t like change, and we’ve always had ramen, we’ve always had mac and cheese.”
Now, she said, fresh produce, meat, dairy and eggs are what’s reliably on the shelf.
With support from FFEN the food shelf:
- Clarified its sourcing strategy using data
- Identified the biggest cost drivers
- Scaled back on shelf-stable items to prioritize fresh food
- Planned targeted food drives to reincorporate variety of shelf stable items
