In May, the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development announced 21 recipients of its “Last Mile Food Grants” designed to expand access to fresh foods.
South Michigan Food Bank in Battle Creek was the only food bank to receive a grant. CEO Peter Vogel said they’ll use it to purchase another refrigerated truck for their “mobile market” pop-up food pantry program.
“What we get to do on our mobile distributions is we have shelves and say: 'Okay, you can get three things in this shelf area, like a vegetable, you can pick this many and this, you can pick this many,'" Vogel said.
The MDARD grants aim to expand fresh food access by providing funds to food distributors and producers that help improve transportation and food storage infrastructure.
Most grant recipients were given funds to purchase refrigerated trucks and other equipment. Vogel said SMFB will use their $81,000 in funding to purchase another one of their “mobile markets”.
“It's a small little tiny refrigerated grocery store," Vogel said.
The mobile markets are refrigerated trucks that act like a pop-up “food pantry on wheels” — offering fresh, healthy foods for areas with lower access to resources.
As a food bank, SMFB is the agency that distributes food to the actual food pantries where people can access the food, as well as other organizations like shelters and nonprofits.
SMFB serves eight counties, but Vogel said they still noticed gaps in the populations they serve. He said they brought in a group that helped them do a data analysis to better understand those gaps.
Vogel said the analysis found there were some areas where people had a hard time accessing SMFB-partnered pantries and other distribution sites — places like rural areas and transportation-limited neighborhoods.
He said that's were the mobile market services come in.
“It lets us get to those places on our own so I don't have to try to make up some partners that can try to run a pantry in an area where we really want a distribution — we can just go in there and show up every week," Vogel said.
Vogel said the purchase of another “mobile market” truck will help expand the service to more areas and make it more reliable.
