Food box program extended

By Keith Whitcomb Jr. Staff Writer
A food-box program that was expected to end in October has been extended to the end of the year, and while the people working with it are glad that’s happening, they wish the program were being handled differently.

The Farmers to Families Food Box Program will hold a distribution event somewhere in Vermont every day beginning Nov. 16, said John Sayles, chief executive officer of Vermont Foodbank, on Tuesday.

Signing up ahead of time is required and can be done online at bit.ly/1110Food. If a person doesn’t have internet access they can call 802-476-0316.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture program was created to address two problems caused by the pandemic, one being that farmers had fewer markets for their produce, and people out of work needed food. Under the program the USDA buys food from the farmers and distributes it to those in need.

For the first few months, the USDA awarded a contract to the Abbey Group, based in Enosburg Falls, but the last two rounds, including this one, went to out-of-state contractors.

According to the USDA’s website, serving Vermont for this round is Lancaster Foods, a Maryland company, which was awarded a $4,064,761 contract to supply 97,011 boxes of food to Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire. For the most recent round, Vermont was served by Costa Foods, based in Boston, and Sysco, a Texas company.

Sayles said Lancaster is a large company that distributes food along the East Coast and working with it has gone well.

“We were able to work out the details very quickly. Obviously, we would have preferred to have a Vermont company and Vermont food, but they’ve been great to work with. They run trucks up to Vermont every day, they’re a supplier to grocery chains, so we’ll be able to get the boxes we need when we need them,” said Sayles.

Under the Abbey Group, which had help from the National Guard in handing food out to people, much of the produce in the boxes was from local sources. Since out of state companies have been selected, none of the food has been from Vermont.

Nina Hansen, vice president of operations at the Abbey Group, said her company has been subcontracted to manage the actual handling of the food, but even so it’s had to cut down on the size of the team it’s been using to do this. She said it once consisted of eight people and is now down to four.

Among those four is Lisa Hubbard, of Franklin, who went to work for the Abbey Group in May after the pandemic forced her to close her cleaning business.

“The job became very important to me because it became the sole income for the family … my husband became ill at the same time the virus hit,” she said, clarifying that her husband wasn’t stricken with COVID-19, but something else. “He hasn’t worked since March, so I’ve become the sole breadwinner of the family.”

While her children are adults now, last year she and her husband adopted their grandchild. Hubbard said she’s been able to make ends meet so far, but isn’t sure what she’ll do at the end of the year when the food-box program is set to end.

The team she’s on travels to distribution sites across the state. She misses the members who are no longer employed by it.

“We had kids that were heading off to school, we had people where this was their first job. We did have an awesome crew we had to cut back on because the contract wasn’t there any longer for us to produce the boxes,” she said. “It was devastating. I talked to some of them and they’re just … they want the job back, a job that’s not there anymore.”

Each box has between 30 and 32 pounds of food, said Sayles, and are packed with a mix of dairy, nonliquid dairy, fruit, vegetables, and shelf-stable meat. Vermont will see 17,906 boxes distributed during the course of this round.

“What we do know is all the reservations fill up, and all the boxes get picked up,” he said. “We have very few left over and those go to network partners and get redistributed quickly.”

Sayles said the Vermont Foodbank and others have advocated for the USDA to expand the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), known locally as 3SquaresVT, which is more versatile and better suited to individual needs than many of the distribution programs out there.

He said this extension came as somewhat of a surprise, as the USDA offered no explanation of why it was extending the program.

“Throughout this process, USDA has communicated poorly with applicants and Vermont’s congressional delegation, and undervalued the importance of having local produce in these boxes,” stated U.S. House Rep., Peter Welch in an email on Tuesday. “It is good news that hungry Vermonters will be receiving additional help, but I am disappointed that USDA has once again focused on delivering the cheapest option possible at the expense of local Vermont farmers who are eager to provide their neighbors with local produce.”

keith.whitcomb @rutlandherald.com