Second Harvest Food Bank of Orange County

Senior Hunger Strategy

In Orange County, older adults are the fastest-growing demographic – the county currently has about 495,000 residents aged 65 or older, roughly 15.7% of the total population. By 2050, the county’s 65-and-up population is expected to nearly double, to 926,000, or 28% of the population. This creates a “silver tsunami” of aging residents who are deeply vulnerable to poverty due to fixed incomes. These residents often have to make sacrifices in their food budget for bigger, more immediate needs like housing, utilities, or medication. Second Harvest provides a solution to the ever-present existence of senior food insecurity through its two Senior Hunger Strategy programs: Senior Grocery and Park-It Market. Our Senior Grocery Program provides fresh, healthy, nutritious food at 45 sites throughout Orange County that primarily serve senior communities. Our community partners offer regular distributions on a monthly, weekly, or twice-a-month schedule at convenient locations like senior centers, low-income senior apartment complexes, churches, and non-profits. Following a compassionate, client-choice model, Senior Grocery provides seniors with the nutritious food they need in a community-based, easily accessible setting and enables seniors to select the food items they need, increasing their independence and reducing food waste. Park-It Market, launched in May 2018, was the nation’s first-of-its-kind, full-service, partially refrigerated mobile market to help serve seniors living on fixed incomes and it remains the largest program of its kind in Orange County. Park-It Market now features two customized refrigerated trailers that allow Second Harvest to provide mobile food distributions at locations that don’t have the staff or storage to hold traditional food distributions, like community centers and senior or low-income housing. These two trailers combined serve about 200 households a day at 15 locations each week. The reliable, consistent food distributions through these two programs provide seniors access to fresh produce, protein, dairy and other nutritious food that promotes a healthy lifestyle, prevents illness and helps stretch their budgets.

Youth Hunger Strategy

OC is one of the wealthiest counties in this nation, yet 1 in 8 children are food insecure and the latest Feeding America data shows there has been a 31.4% increase in food insecurity for children in Orange County. Without proper nutrition children find it challenging to focus on learning and studies show that food insecurity leads to lower attendance and graduation rates. Our Youth Hunger Strategy works to bridge the meal gap for children by providing consistent access to nutritious foods that will help them learn, play, and grow. Mobile School Pantry provides nutritious food directly to children and families in OC through ‘pop-up’ farmer’s market-style food distributions during drop-off or pick-up at 78 K-12 schools. Permanent School Pantry consists of mini-market-style pantries on the campuses of 7 school and family resource centers. This allows families, individuals, and students to “shop” for the food they want and prefer in a warm, inviting atmosphere. Our College Pantry Program was introduced in 2019 to help the estimated 40% of college students in OC who are food insecure. These on-campus pantries support college students as they pursue higher education to create a better future for themselves and their families. We currently operate College Pantries at18 college campuses across Orange County. Kids Cafe provides nutritious meals, snacks, and nutrition education to children 18 and under through afterschool and summer programs at about 50 locations.

Farm Program

Second Harvest’s Farm Programs (Harvest Solutions Farm and Founders Farm) allow us to mitigate challenges like rising food prices and supply chain disruptions by growing our own fresh produce. Both farms are located in Irvine within 3.6 miles from the Food Bank, greatly reducing the number of miles trucks drive to deliver ultra-fresh produce to our distribution center and thereby reducing the environmental impact of this food. This also drastically cuts the time from “farm to plate,” providing children, families and seniors in our community with consistent access to the nutrient-dense food that can set them up for success in school, at work, and in life. Harvest Solutions Farm (HSF) is a partnership with Solutions for Urban Agriculture, led by A.G. Kawamura, Board Chairman and former Secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture; and University of California South Coast Research & Extension Center. HSF encompasses up to 40 acres during the year where Second Harvest volunteers help plant, maintain, and harvest a variety of fruits and vegetables. HSF’s first planting was in August 2021 and since then we have harvested more than 6.8 million pounds of fresh produce. Founders Farm is a collaboration between Southwinds Farm and Gardens, Solutions for Urban Agriculture, and OC Produce and consists of 150 raised beds where we plant, tend, and harvest romaine, butter crunch, red sails lettuces and Swiss chard, and other crops. Founders Farm also serves as an educational hub, demonstrating diverse and cost-effective growing methods with a commitment to promoting organic and farm-to-table practices.

Recurring Delivery

Second Harvest has switched to an all-delivery model to serve our partners. Previously, some partners would pick up food from our Distribution Center, but this limited what items and how much food they could receive based on the vehicle size and the ability to keep items at a food safe temperature while transporting back to their site. Now we make regular deliveries of pallets of food to 114 of our community organization partners. With our trucks, we can deliver the needed amount of food for the site. And since most sites are equipped with cold storage, they can receive perishable, refrigerated and/or frozen items along with non-perishable food.

Grocery Rescue

Grocery Rescue, GR, is our food recovery program where excess food from local grocery and retails stores is donated to Second Harvest and our partners. With Direct GR, our partners make weekly pickups of donated food, bring it back to their site, sort and weigh it, report that information to Second Harvest, and then distribute the food to their clients. Some sites make dozens of pickups a week! The entire Direct GR program includes 300+ retail stores donating food through 900 pickups a week by 74 of our partners. For our In-DC GR, Second Harvest trucks and drivers perform up to 24 pickups a week from local grocery stores and bring it back to our Distribution Center in Irvine to be processed by staff and volunteers. This food is then distributed to partners who aren’t part of Direct GR.