VALDOSTA, Ga. (WALB) – Supply chain issues have impacted many Southwest Georgia businesses and organizations, including Second Harvest Food Bank.
The food bank provides much-needed food and groceries like these and these to those facing food insecurity in South Georgia. However, this act of service has been more challenging in recent months.
Eliza McCall has been Second Harvest of South Georgia’s Chief Marketing Officer for 9 years. She says since her time there this is the first time she’s seen the prices increase quite like this.
“What we’re seeing is substantially increased cost we’re seeing not being able to source the items that we need or if we can source them not in the quantities that we need to feed more than 1,000 children a day,” she says.
McCall says Second Harvest’s goal is to feed more than 2,000 meals and snacks per day. They service 26 South Georgia counties. These supply chain issues affect what items they are able to offer as part of a meal.
“We might have plans to offer baby carrots and we can’t get those and so we have to figure out another vegetable to offer it may be that we had planned on serving ham sandwiches and we have to offer something else.”
Congress passed Keep Kids Fed Act to help schools that struggled with meeting nutritional standards due to supply chain issues. The new bill extends waivers for schools struggling to meet nutrition standards due to supply chain issues and allows schools to continue to serve meals this summer at no cost to families.
Schools have felt the strain of rising food, gas, and labor cost. The bill will now only provide free meals but will increase federal reimbursements for every school lunch by 40 cents and school breakfast by 15 cents.
McCall says they tell me the passing of this act has been such a relief because the kids look forward to the meals they are able to provide.
“These flexibilities during Covid have been an absolute game-changer for particularly for areas like ours rural areas we’ve been asking for effects abilities like this for as long as I’ve been on staff,” she added.
The Keep Kids Fed Act will be extended through summer to the next school year.
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