How one food shelf is saving dollars, providing consistent service to its community
Carrie Opheim has a background as a retailer and brought that lens with her when she took on the work of running the McLeod Food Shelf.
“You provide true food security through consistency,” she said.
For Opheim, that means making sure the shelves are stocked with what people actually need. Meat. Dairy. Produce. Eggs. The staples that make a meal feel like a meal. The commitment was always there. What she lacked was a way to measure it.
FFEN’s food sourcing and prioritization tools changed that.
“Now we make sure we have what is more important to our shoppers first, and then fit those lower-priority, higher-cost things into our budget as we can,” she said. “This is very valuable data for us and it looks at things in a way we weren’t. It’s black and white for my staff to identify those most important things…it has been eye-opening for them to look at things differently.”
The team at the food shelves in Glencoe and Hutchinson uses FFEN’s Strategic Food Sourcing Analysis Report and Consultation along with FFEN’s Food Sourcing Prioritization tools and training, to aid in strategic planning and budgeting, grant accountability and showing responsible stewardship of dollars to their donors. The tools don’t just improve operations, they give Opheim something rare in the daily grind of running a food shelf: perspective.
“When you can have somebody pull up – things just look differently and it makes you choose differently. We are so stuck in the daily duties of meeting the needs of this operation, and meeting needs as they arrive, I don’t think we’d ever have the time to crunch the numbers.”
That perspective has paid off in very practical ways.
When egg prices shot up the food shelf was looking at a $4,000 bill to keep them stocked. That, she said, was a breaking point. The tools helped her make the call – and when prices came back down and she knew exactly how to slot them back in. Low cost, high priority. Back on the shelf.
Now, her latest Food Sourcing Analysis Report has her rethinking something bigger – the food shelf’s Mobile Outreach Program.
The numbers tell a clear story. Serving shoppers through the mobile bus costs $7 per person compared with $1.61 at the brick and mortar sites. The bus currently makes six regular stops a month to community centers, churches and apartment buildings in 6 cities. Shoppers board the bus to choose from shelf stable items as well as fresh produce, frozen proteins, grains, dairy and bakery goods.
The service is designed to increase access to food because of transportation or mobility barriers, Opheim said. But, the data has her asking better questions. Could food lockers or small pantries at those same locations serve people just as well at a lower cost? Could the bus be deployed in a way that reduces expenses, expands access to food and still delivers quality?
“We wouldn’t have had any of those thoughts until we looked at the data from FFEN – you don’t want to be broke and in debt before you realize what the problem is,” she said. “The ability to identify what the problem is when we’re mostly volunteer run is important – we don’t have data analysis experts running food shelves.”
Instead, she said she has guidance from FFEN, and for Opheim, that’s making all the difference.
