Healthy Communities Need Healthy Foods

Feeding people facing hunger is about more than simply providing food. It’s about providing wellness, nourishment and strength. That’s why it’s our mission to provide the most nutritious food possible to improve people’s health and well-being.

We know that for populations like children and seniors, a balanced diet can be particularly essential to succeeding in school, complementing medication and battling disease. Unfortunately, nutrition-related illnesses disproportionately affect food-insecure people.

Every day, Feeding America commits to building stronger communities with nutritious food. Here's how:

Making more fresh produce available to hungry people

Sourcing and distributing food that is essential to a healthy diet helps us best meet the needs of the people we serve. To do that, we’re constantly innovating more ways to get perishable food to people who need it. Equipped with new solutions, 69 percent of the food the Feeding America network now distributes aligns with USDA nutritional guidelines.

• Produce Matchmaker connects growers of highly perishable, fresh produce directly with food banks in the Feeding America network to quickly and efficiently rescue surplus food.
• Mobile food pantries provide a critical lifeline to healthy foods for families in hard-to-reach and underserved areas. Our mobile pantries create access to healthy foods by meeting people where they are.
• MealConnect makes safe and quick food donations possible by matching food businesses directly to the Feeding America network.

Opening the door to healthy eating

We’re helping to promote healthy food choices in food pantries, empowering the people we serve to make the best nutritional choices for themselves and their families.

• Smart merchandising through our network helps make choosing healthy food a habit. It can be as simple as putting cabbage in a prominent location, displaying whole wheat bread and clearly explaining the benefits of items that can make healthy eating easier.
• Many food banks in the Feeding America network offer hands-on education, including cooking demonstrations and taste tests that promote easy ways to use a wide variety of produce. Placing recipe cards near produce also gives families ideas for making healthy meals.

Researching how health and hunger intersect

We know that there’s a strong relationship between nutrition, health and food insecurity. That's why we continue to conduct research on how these topics intersect — and how we can use that knowledge to better serve people facing hunger. Take an in-depth look at the connection we’ve found between health and hunger.