Click and go: Calgary Food Bank now offering customized food hampers
Clients select what they want on a tablet, helping to reduce food waste
The Calgary Food Bank is now offering customizable hampers to reduce food waste and cater to individual dietary needs, the charity says.
Robert McDonald, manager of client services at the Calgary Food Bank, has been working with the non-profit for more than seven years. He says the shift to custom hampers is something the organization has been considering for some time.
The food bank has been giving out hampers for more than 30 years and they've always been built generically, which McDonald says wasn't working very well.
He added the difference in what people eat is staggering, not only between demographics, but between people in the same household.
The program has been a hit, with more than 90 per cent of Calgary Food Bank users agreeing they greatly prefer the new system to the old one, according to McDonald.
"It's been going extremely well," he said, adding custom hampers have been in place since Thanksgiving.
"Think of it like click and collect at the grocery store. When our clients arrive for their appointment to pick up some food, they meet with a volunteer who checks them in.… They get to indicate how much bread, how much rice, how much pasta, how much of different types of meat — or if they're vegetarian, maybe it's all eggs and milk instead of meat."
McDonald says that after a client picks the items they want using a tablet, it gets packaged and brought out to them. He says it's a practical way to approach giving food to those who need it, especially those with religious, cultural or medical dietary restrictions.
"If someone's vegetarian, if someone has diabetes or another medical condition, they might need different foods to live a healthy lifestyle than the average person," McDonald said.
"We don't need to build 50 different types of food hampers for people, they can just pick exactly what's needed for them."
McDonald says the new customized system also decreases food waste, because when people received generic hampers in the past, they were inevitably going to get something they either didn't like or couldn't eat.
The food bank has been inundated with clients over the past year. The organization said in October that more people were relying on its services than ever before.
The charity served 173,254 food hampers between Sept. 1, 2023, and Aug. 31, 2024 — its last fiscal year.
Francie Lowenstein has been volunteering her time at the food bank for about 16 years. She says the new system helps alleviate some of the burden that clients have of using the food bank's services.
"We're trying to give them a choice. It's hard enough to come here as it is, so to give them a bit of a choice … is huge for them," she said.
Lowenstein noted that in past years, she was one of the volunteers choosing which protein and vegetables would go into food hampers in accordance with Calgary Food Bank guidelines.
"But now they can choose. If they want to have all eggs, they can have all eggs. If they want all milk, they can have all milk. If they want just two loaves of bread and three boxes of cereal, it's their choice," Lowenstein said.
She says switching to a custom hamper system hasn't increased the workload for volunteers and has made things easier for clients — and reduced the amount of food returned to the food bank.
"A lot of the things that we were giving them when they didn't have a choice, they would send them back in the cart. They wouldn't even take them because it was nothing they were used to.… It's been a really easy transition and a good transition," Lowenstein said.
'We came from an era of beggars can't be choosers'
Food banks in other parts of the province have implemented similar systems.
The Interfaith Food Bank Society of Lethbridge also offers a system that lets clients choose which food items they get.
Danielle McIntyre, executive director of the Lethbridge non-profit, says the food bank has what it calls a "pick room" to allow for various dietary needs to be met.
"As we see our community grow over the years, we start to see a lot of different cultural groups coming to our community, which means people eat differently," McIntyre said. "And so we have been trying to accommodate things like a halal diet. We also have people who struggle with special dietary needs because of medical reasons — diabetes, pregnancy. Babies eat differently than adults do."
The Interfaith Food Bank Society prepares standard hampers that contain most of the pantry items that a family would need, McIntyre says, but most perishable items are found in the pick room.
"This gives our families the opportunity for an element of choice where they can choose those perishable items that are added on top of their standard hamper," she said.
The pick room is designed like a grocery store. Items are lined on shelves and clients can walk through the aisles and select what they want up to a certain limit. McIntyre says they've been running it since 2010.
She added the pick room has helped bolster the dignity of the food bank's clients.
"We came from an era of beggars can't be choosers.… A lot of times we victim blame and suggest that maybe people are in poverty because of poor decisions they've made or that somehow it is their fault, when in reality, any circumstance can put somebody in a situation where they're food insecure," McIntyre said.
There has always been a stigma around asking for help, she says, so when people in need come to the food bank and are treated as though they've made the right choice to get help, it allows for better relationships with clients and improves their confidence.
McIntyre says the Lethbridge agency sees a monthly average of about 1,000 households, or 2,500 people, using its services, which is double what it saw before the COVID-19 pandemic.
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With files from Jennifer Dorozio, Ose Irete and James Young