Smart Solutions in Challenging Times: How VAFS Food Boxes Can Support Your Community
At VAFS, we understand the unique challenges food banks are facing right now. With funding cuts, fewer donations, and a growing demand for services, every dollar and every decision matters more than ever. That’s why we’ve built our food box program to offer practical, cost-effective solutions that help you stretch your resources and better serve your clients. What We Do: Food Boxes Built at Our Wayland Mixing Center Our food boxes are assembled with care and efficiency out of our Wayland Mixing Center. From there, we’re able to ship pallet quantities of shelf-stable, prepacked boxes directly to your facility—saving you time, money, and labor. We offer two main options: Standard Box Offerings: Curated menus of shelf-stable essentials packed and ready to ship. Custom Builds & Labeling: Choose your mix of items and branding to meet your specific program and community needs. Why Food Boxes Make Sense Right Now In today’s tough funding environment, food boxes can provide real relief for overstretched food banks. Here’s how: 🗸 Variety Without the Volume Many food banks are forced to buy full truckloads (FTLs) of just one or two items to get the best pricing—but that often means limited variety for clients. Our boxes
Moving Forward Without Certainty
A strong early candidate for 2025’s word of the year is uncertainty. At VAFS, we get it and we work on and around it, on your behalf, every day. While uncertainty is nothing new in hunger relief, we’re now in a period of extreme volatility on par with the lead up to COVID, but driven by a tangle of tariffs, federal cuts, and rising demand. Federal funding cuts to programs have started, but we cannot predict holistically the depth, duration, or net impact. The confirmed $1B cuts from Local Food for Schools and Local Food Purchase Assistance programs may be tip of the iceberg, or not. The global and domestic fallout from tariffs and trade wars, at a minimum, risks short-term price increases and long-term increases in food and packaging costs and availability for both imported and domestically produced commodities. Macroeconomic risk of recession and the knock-on effects on employment, wages, and food insecurity is increasing while Q1 US GDP growth was negative. We are halfway to a qualified recession. Hunger relief organizations need to do even more with less while dealing with invisible supply chain delays that compound core mission risk. Planning depends on assumptions that we can no