You may have noticed around the holidays each year, small retail stores “pop-up” in malls and in vacant storefronts around town.
Food banks and pantries have borrowed the concept and employed it to deliver emergency food to families in need.
MOMS has taken this concept a step further, turning the pop-up into a Mobile Farmer’s Market.
Anyone who needs food gets food.
Nolan collected Fresh Direct Bags to help us deliver more food to homes during the pandemic.
To shop at our pantry, you only need to show up and sign your name. To receive home deliveries, you have to fill out a Virtual Pantry form on our site. And if you know someone who needs food, just come and we will fill a bag for you.
Traditionally, food hubs are connection points between suppliers and distributors of food. Small farms rely on food hubs to connect them with local buyers.
Refrigerated container at Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers in Ossining, our farm-to-family food hub.
MOMS borrowed this idea and built on it, employing a refrigerated container as a receiving site for farm-fresh produce during the growing season, and recovered perishable food all year long. Food is delivered to the hub, where it is weighed, sorted, categorized and stored temporarily until it can be loaded on our Pantry Truck for distribution.
Unlike a food pantry which functions as a community store, the hub is more of a wholesale distribution point, aggregating multiple deliveries for local distributors throughout the community.
At 509 North Main Street we have an operation center, which is the heart of all our programs. We have a commercial kitchen that produces meals for communities in need across the region.
509 North Main Street Port Chester, NY 10573
COVID-19 turned our world upside down, severely restricting access to food for nearly everyone living in poverty, as well as the community in general.
Suddenly, we had to shift from inviting people into our facility to sit and eat and healthy meal to finding a way to package and deliver food to people’s homes.
Working with other organizations in Port Chester, we began with home delivery.
We also quickly evolved to providing mobile pantry sites which we called Pop-Up Pantries.
We continue to evolve the model, working to make access to food even easier for people living in neighborhoods that are not well served.
