Lift carts whiz around corners and dart down long aisles, where 30-foot steel shelves full of boxes tower above. Beeping and buzzing, they push pallets of bananas and beans, canned goods and condiments to loading bays where trucks load up and deliver the food to local food pantries.
With the holidays approaching, it's high season at the Greater Boston Food Bank. But this year is even busier than usual. A spike in demand from the recent reduction in SNAP food benefits has yet to abate, even though most SNAP payments have resumed. And many expect the need for emergency food will continue to climb.
"This is just the beginning," says warehouse lead Adrian James, driving out of the cooler with another full pallet. "Who knows how bad it could get. That's the scary part."
GBFB staff have been scrambling to keep up. CEO Catherine D'Amato says she's focusing on fundraising, hoping to buy more food, and is trying to "sustain as much as possible for as long as possible." But, she says, "This is not a matter of one and done."
The GBFB is just one of many food banks and pantries around the nation feeling the strain, with no expectation of a reprieve anytime soon. Even if they catch up from this month's funding crisis, the Trump administration's Big Beautiful Bill Act is set to shrink federal SNAP spending by billions of dollars over the next couple of years.
At the same time, federal cuts to other safety net programs like Medicaid, affordable housing and health insurance subsidies are expected to compound the pressure on food banks and pantries that provide produce, meat, dairy and dry goods to millions of low-income U.S. residents.
"More people will lose benefits and they will increasingly need to turn to the charitable food sector, and that will turn need up again and again and again as those changes go into effect," says Linda Nageotte, president of Feeding America, a national network of food banks, pantries and meal programs.
The result will feel "like a tsunami, which is going to just wipe out people," says Harvard School of Public Health professor Sara Bleich, who worked on food security and nutrition for the Obama and Biden administrations. "It's going to have a generational impact, and it's just heartbreaking."
Food banks and pantries already are leaning more on help from state and local governments and private donations. But it's unrealistic, they say, to expect charitable organizations to scale up enough to compensate for cuts in federal programs, which historically have provided nine times what charitable food organizations deliver.
"I'm anxious and I'm not sleeping," says Eric Cooper, CEO of the San Antonio Food Bank in Texas. He's trying to remain hopeful that demand will decrease, but that may be "naive" of him, he says, as he's "still sending out more [food] than what's coming in."
Cooper says his inventory is less than half what it usually is the week before Thanksgiving, and rising costs are making it difficult to restock. He locked in his holiday turkey purchase a year ago, he says, but prices went up so much, the vendor would no longer honor the deal. He's also had to hire extra drivers to pick up food, and he's paying staff overtime.
Meanwhile, donations from his annual fall fundraising campaign, which usually carry him through the holidays, already are used up.
"We're just not going to be able to fill that need," he says.
At the Facing Hunger Food Bank in Huntington, W.V., CEO Cynthia Kirkhart also isn't seeing a dip in demand. She too is paying overtime to her employees who worked 18 days straight without a day off.
The work is taking an emotional toll. One day this month, cars were still lined up waiting for food at one of her mobile pantries when there was little left to offer.
"It came down to a bag of potatoes," Kirkhart recalls.
There were two families in one car. Her staff offered the bag, and told them, "This is all we have." They asked the families to split it.
"That's soul searing," Kirkhart says.
Trump administration officials say the cuts to SNAP are intended ensure the program is "sustainable for future generations" by cracking down on "proven cases of waste, fraud and abuse." In a statement to NPR, a spokesperson said, "The President is doing something about it."
Back at the Greater Boston Food Bank, Richard Green, director of the Saint Matthew's pantry in Dorchester, heaves big bags of food into a box truck.
"We can't keep up with it," he says between throws.
Green has been volunteering for the pantry for a decade, and calls feeding the hungry his "mission." He doesn't buy into the doomsday predictions, nor does he blame the federal government. The government, he says, is just doing its job.
"The government has to be vigilant and make sure that everybody that's on SNAP is eligible to be on SNAP," Green says. "You'd be a fool if you didn't think that a lot of people would be taking advantage of it."
Still, he doesn't expect demand will let up any time soon. He's working on setting up new systems to make it easier for his pantry to take donations online.
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