Annual Report 2022

Some organizations follow a script.

They come to the job with a preprinted and time-honored traditional approach to getting the day’s work done. And for many, that approach works. It provides a solid foundation on which to sustain an organization, but it can also be a hinderance, keeping a business from adapting to change, adjusting to demands and even surviving.

If we felt we had come up with all the answers and all we needed to do was just stay the course, we would take our script and follow it religiously. But we know we are not done yet. So, we toss the script daily, because we believe hunger is a solvable problem, and until the problem is solved, there is still more work to do.

All who have been with us through 2020 and 2021 know we didn’t sit still and wait for the pandemic and its challenges to pass. We totally reinvented ourselves, rising up out of the church basement to design and implement a major feeding program focused on the most challenging and most rewarding part of the job, delivering food to the people, where they live and work.

The shortest part of the trip a truck makes is also the most expensive part of the journey, and that is what is commonly called the “last mile” of product delivery from the last “hub” to the consumer.

In 2021, we focused on building and supplying the “hub”, getting fresh food from farms, supermarkets and food banks to local refrigerated containers for easy access by our trucks and the trucks of other organizations needing food for their communities.

In 2022, we expanded our reach, adding dozens of new food sources, bringing our food recovery total to 50,000 pounds per month by year end, and that number continues to grow.

The Friendly Fridge Network partnership provides hands-on volunteer support in stocking fridges, freezers and cupboards, extending our reach to food insecure neighborhoods.

But Meals On Main Street is reaching more than those who come to our trucks. In 2022, we partnered with The Friendly Fridge Network to supply groceries, perishable and frozen food to an underserved neighborhood in Port Chester via our first cooperative weekly pantry, the MOMS Provisions Pantry at 201 King Street, in the Assembly of God World Vision Church. This is our first volunteer stocked and operated pantry, but it won’t be our last.

And of course we cannot forget all the meals we prepare and distribute from our kitchen. Actually, we have been operating out of two kitchens while ours is being built, allowing us to deliver as many as 20,000 meals per month, more than doubling our output from a year ago. We now provide meals three ways, frozen family-style packaged meals for home delivery, individual hot meals for daily distribution, and hot trays of food for soup kitchens like Hope Community Center in New Rochelle, helping to meet the growing demand for lunches and dinners.

All of our programs have one thing in common. They bring the community together. It is a neighbor helping neighbor approach that is designed to create opportunities, feed needs and foster hope. With the foundation laid, having a full complement of programs for communities to choose from, we are now looking to build community partnerships throughout the county.

If you want to learn more, drop me a line at Director@MealsOnMainStreet.org, and we can talk about it over coffee.

Best,

Bill Cusano

MOMS Vision

Build Community Through Food

Our combination of custom designed mobile pantry trucks and portable food hubs allow us to supplement the work of local pantries and soup kitchens to deliver recovered food and farm-fresh produce to families in need where they live.

MOMS Goal

Provide access to food for all in need

MOMS Actions:

Our combination of custom designed mobile pantry trucks and portable food hubs allow us to supplement the work of local pantries and soup kitchens to deliver recovered food and farm-fresh produce to families in need where they live.
Partnering with Feeding Westchester, we implemented a food recovery program in August which is targeted to salvage over 500,000 pounds of perishable food which would have gone into landfills. The program grew from 6 supermarket locations to over 20 by year end and it will continue to grow in 2023.
MOMS opens its first volunteer-run pantry in partnership with AGWV Church and The Friendly Fridge Network. The MOMS Provisions Pantry is open Saturdays and distributes to over 100 families per week.
MOMS goes mobile with Pop-Up pantries, resulting in a five-fold increase of groceries going directly to food insecure neighborhoods.
MOMS developed an extensive food recovery network, eliminating waste and securing quality perishable goods for our clientele.
MOMS sets up our first Food Hub, allowing our partners to come to us when they need food and to give us their excess food which we distribute to other agencies within 48 hours.
MOMS constructs a virtual platform for clientele to shop online for a weekly at home delivery.
MOMS expanded our pioneering project with restaurants, purchasing meals directly from them at cost and distributing them via our programs.
MOMS secures shares in local and regional farms, providing farm to table produce.
MOMS supports New York State Contact Tracing by supplying groceries and meals to residents quarantined for Covid infection or exposure.
MOMS continues our collaboration with BOCES, utilizing their chefs and students to make trays of prepared foods.

2022 Results

Total Meals Provided = 571,645

Donated and Recovered Pantry Food = 384,573 lbs. Up 59%

Pantry Meals provided = 422,275 Up 54%

Avg. cost of meal = $2.80 (Includes food, labor and overhead) Up 19%

Restaurant & Kitchen Meals provided = 149,370 Down 3%

Inflation has had an impact on all our costs. We have increased our food recovery program to provide donated meats, produce and dry goods to our kitchen in order to keep costs down. That approach is working, so our plan is to double our efforts. Working with Feeding Westchester, we are adding more supermarkets to our list of pickup sites.

2022 Accomplishments

As other Port Chester Organizations which had been dependent upon MOMS’ food hub expanded their capacity to receive and distribute more frequently, MOMS added new partners and expanded its Mobile Pantry operation to fill food insecurity gaps throughout Port Chester.
MOMS established a satellite Food Hub in Ossining for the collection and redistribution of fresh and recovered food. We shifted the concept from a fully staffed hub to a remote site, reducing overall costs, while maximizing storage capacity for the growing food recovery program.
MOMS added three senior stops per week to its Mobile Pantry Routes beginning in September. We made 40 stops, reaching 1,207 individuals where they live.
MOMS cultivated relationships to help existing pantries, soup kitchens and outreach organizations to ensure that food continues to flow to families in need. New or enhanced partnerships now exist in Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, Somers, Croton-on-Hudson, White Plains, Dobbs Ferry, Tarrytown and Ossining.
MOMS continues to look for ways to expand its capacity to flow food from a variety of sources through to families in need. The next generation of the community-based food hub is a food depot which will provide round-the-clock food recovery capability, helping us eliminate food waste on a larger scale.
MOMS supports organizations that deliver food to families in need, offering the farm-fresh produce, meals and food recovered from retail establishments at no cost to them. Working together, we feed more people and avoid food waste.
MOMS took the lead in developing new concepts to reduce costs and increase food delivery. Our commitment to continuous improvement has resulted in innovative enhancements to our programs and those of our partners. The Turnkey Pantry Program is an example, where volunteers are able to operate a weekly pantry without having to manage the acquisition of food.

Reimagining Feeding Programs

In 2022, We set out to build a scalable and sustainable operation serving communities everywhere

The key to our success is our focus on food, the most fundamental of human needs. We know our clients need more than basic food assistance, and helping them have quality food for their family lets them know that their priority is our priority. Nothing expresses love more than being able to put a meal on the table. So, we go to extremes to make the family meal a joyful and positive experience.

According to a study performed at 50 food pantries in The Bronx in 2016, “Access to adequate food may be conceptualized within five dimensions:

Availability (item variety),
Accessibility (e.g., hours of operation),
Accommodation (e.g., cultural sensitivity),
Affordability (costs, monetary or otherwise), and
Acceptability (e.g., as related to quality).”

The results of the study identified three main problems people relying on food pantries encountered. They were: “(1) Pantries were not reliably open, (2) Even when pantries were open, access to food was restricted, (3) Open pantries frequently had insufficient food supply to meet client demand.”

Feeding Westchester making a delivery during the pandemic.

During the pandemic, food banks were suddenly able to deliver huge quantities of food to pantries, but sometimes it was too much food.

Unless the pantries had enough storage space, especially for refrigerated items, they had to settle for less or miss an opportunity altogether. Many pantries closed or curtailed hours.

Availability

Organizations like ours, which were able to convert their space from public access to storage facilities benefitted from the increase in available food, but we chose to go a step further and gather as much food as possible. Our plan was to acquire food not just for our own operations, but for anyone else who needed food and didn’t have the capacity to accept it. We established ourselves as a community-based food hub, focusing on sourcing available donations for all the feeding programs in the community. This food hub concept addressed the first dimension of food insecurity, Availability.

ACCESSIBILITY

Instead of trying to distribute all types of available food via one method, as we had when people would come to us to have a meal and shop for groceries, our approach shifted to a variety of ways we could bring the food to the people. Groceries, dry goods, produce and frozen meals are packaged and delivered in bags to people’s homes. But people can also get fresh produce and other perishable food from our mobile pantry trucks. And in our partnership with The Friendly Fridge Network, we are setting up micro-pantry sites where people can have access to food after hours, when other locations are closed.

Accommodation

When we opened our food hub to other pantries and soup kitchens we discovered something we hadn’t expected. Some of the unique and unusual food products we were recovering from supermarkets were things we didn’t know what to do with. Our clients were not that interested in gluten-free pizzas or oat milk. But there were other organizations going out to buy these things. Our approach is to offer other pantries opportunities to get these items at our food depot when they are available.

The more we gather, the more likely we will have something someone needs, and we will be able to accommodate more cultural tastes or nutritional needs.

Affordability

The cost of food for a family of four, according to an article in the Motley Fool published in February of 2023, is just under $1,000 per month. That is based on a balanced diet for a couple with two children, ages 6 and 11. Pre-pandemic, pantries, on average, were supplying a minimum of three days’ worth of food each month, or about 10%. During the pandemic, many pantries removed the restriction, so people were able to come and shop more often. It was necessary, since many had lost their income and could not afford to buy groceries at all.

Loading the trunk with bags of groceries and meals for home delivery.

Mobile Pantry distribution in Port Chester.

But there are other factors involved in making food more affordable for families in need. One is to be able to get to the pantry and to be able to carry home what you get. The more often we visit a neighborhood, the easier it is for people to choose just what they need for the short term. So long as they know the schedule, they can plan their trips and avoid spending money to get to the food.

Acceptability

If the quality of the food is poor, people will not find it acceptable for their families. Recovered, or donated food, food that would otherwise be thrown away, needs to be “harvested” from the stores daily and quickly made available to avoid spoilage. Since we have no idea what we will receive on a daily basis, we purchase shares in local community gardens and farms to ensure that there is an abundance of farm-fresh produce throughout the growing season.

The Total Package…

From Food Hub to Food Depot

As we ready our headquarters on North Main Street, we are making plans to upgrade and expand the Port Chester Food Hub into a local Food Depot.
Working closely with Feeding Westchester, the food bank for Westchester County, we are gearing up to gather as much recovered (supermarket donated) food as possible so none of it goes to waste, and more families benefit.
While a food hub functions like an end point on a train line, a depot is designed to accept a continuous flow of deliveries at one end, while loading up trucks and cars to continue the flow of food out the other end. The engine that keeps the food moving is the staff and volunteers who receive, weigh, sort, and package the food so it can be quickly loaded onto mobile pantry trucks, bundled in bags for home delivery, or shipped to soup kitchens and pantries to keep their stock levels high.
The beauty of the food depot is it serves two purposes:
First, it is a backup supply location for other agencies needing to get food out to people in a hurry. And second, it is a place where families in need can go to load up their carts and bags whenever they need food.
The food depot we plan to implement in Port Chester will supply existing and new locations throughout our area and will work in concert with our food hub in Ossining to gather and distribute fresh and recovered food throughout the region.

Serving The Community

Building Community Through Food — How MOMS works within the community.

OPERATING REVENUE 2022

TOTAL OPERATING REVENUE = $2,518,499

Operating Expenses 2022

Total Operating Expenses = $1,451,390

Program Expenses 2022

Total Program Expenses = $858,618

Program Expense Detail

Total Program Expenses = $858,618

**Building Community Through Food**

Operating without a home of our own has made it difficult for us to involve the community in doing the things we used to do so well, like preparing and serving meals or helping people shop for groceries. What we have been able to do is reach out to the community and develop a variety of individual and group programs to support our food distribution efforts.
Partnering with Our New Way Garden and Redemption Church, we provided food for a brunch.

Everyone is welcome at the table

In October, we held our first Community Dinner at Port Chester Middle School. It was a true community endeavor, working with STEER for Student Athletes, Open Door, and the Port Chester Hunger Fighters.

If they cannot come to us, we will go to them.

One day a week throughout the school year, we bring our mobile pantry truck to schools and community centers throughout the region, working with educators to give students hands-on involvement in the work of ending food insecurity.

Students at Bridges in Cos Cob, CT loading our truck with donations of food.

Students at St. Paul’s Church in Riverside loading the truck with donations of food.