How to actually feed America

Good intentions matter, but good systems turn generosity into abundance.

We hope all of our U.S. readers enjoyed a happy Thanksgiving yesterday. Today we’re sharing a guest post from our Assistant Editor Caroline Sutton on an innovative system for getting donated food to the places it’s needed most.

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Photo by Jon Kopaloff/Getty Images for Feeding America and North Valley Caring Services

One of Susannah Morgan’s early memories from her years running the Food Bank of Alaska involves a truckload of pickles she never wanted. Not jars of pickles, either — five-gallon buckets. Accepting them meant paying $5,000 to ship that heavy load across the Gulf of Alaska. Rejecting them meant losing her place in line and waiting who-knows-how-long to be offered another donation from Feeding America, a clearinghouse that collects surplus food from grocery stores, producers, and farms and routes it through a national network of food banks like hers. In that moment, she was forced to choose between wasting scarce resources or wasting scarce opportunities.

For decades, this was simply how the largest charitable food network in the United States functioned.

Food banks waited their turn. A donor offered the central clearinghouse whatever he happened to have on hand. And each food bank, equipped with imperfect information, faced the same narrow question when it finally reached the front of the line: yes or no? Either take the pickles or fall to the bottom of the list. Either pay to ship something they sort of wanted, or save scarce resources in the hopes something more useful would be available later.

The entire system relied on generosity, and it did receive immense generosity, but lacked any of the institutional structure that would allow that generosity to turn into something bigger. Morgan told me the old system created a “scarcity mindset,” in which food banks compared their luck with everyone else’s and quietly resented the randomness. At one point she had been desperately requesting frozen chicken for months, only to get a call announcing: “Good news — we finally got you chicken. Bad news — it’s in Alabama.” She was sitting in Anchorage at the time. Under the old rules, she either had to send a truck across the continent or lose her place in line. “Nobody does their best work in a scarcity mindset,” she said. It was a system powered by goodwill but governed by guesswork.

Twenty years ago, Feeding America decided to try something different. And the story of that experiment begins at the University of Chicago, which is not where you might instinctively look for anti-hunger policy ideas, but is a place unusually well equipped to think about allocation problems.

Building a better food bank

In the early 2000s, the charity brought in Chicago business school professors — including economist Canice Prendergast, operations expert Donald Eisenstein, and organizational behavior scholar Harry Davis — to help figure out how to allocate donated food across more than 200 food banks in a way that reflects real needs, real preferences, and real constraints. Feeding America was facing one of the classic dilemmas of public policy: how to match scarce resources to competing priorities fairly, efficiently, and predictably.

What struck the economists was the absence of information. Food banks had no way to express what they valued, no view of what was available, and no means to coordinate across regions. Some were excellent at logistics. Others had deep relationships with donors. Others had neither advantage. Yet all were trying to serve their communities under enormous pressure.

The Chicago team proposed something that, at the time, sounded like an odd choice for a charitable network: a market, complete with a custom-designed currency called “shares.” Every food bank would receive an allotment of shares based on how many people it served. Those shares could then be used to bid on truckloads of food in a daily national auction.

If a food bank desperately needed cereal, it could signal that by bidding more. If it already had enough cereal but urgently needed rice, it could save its shares for that instead. If something undesirable arrived — like potato chips or, true story, Tupperware lids missing their containers — the auction assigned it a negative price: taking it earned you extra shares.

It was a system designed to convert preferences (information each food bank had about its community’s needs) into visible, actionable signals. Prendergast describes this as the price discovery function of markets: the mechanism that reveals “how much you like a certain kind of food compared to another kind of food.” The bidding activity quickly revealed patterns no centralized planner could have seen.

Cereal, for instance, wasn’t just more valuable than broccoli; it was dramatically more valuable. The economists had assumed maybe a 6:1 ratio in preference intensity. The auction showed a ratio closer to 35:1.

Source: How Food Banks Use Markets to Feed the Poor

Produce, which is perishable and already abundant in the donation pipeline, often cleared at nearly zero shares. Shelf-stable foods like pasta, rice, and canned goods drew consistently high bids. Potato chips, which are low in nutrients and break easily during transport, were so unwanted they routinely required subsidies to move.

And the system changed donor behavior as well. Under the old queue system, donors could wait days for a food bank to accept or reject an item, leaving their warehouses clogged with product they were trying to move quickly. But once 200 food banks were simultaneously able to bid, donations moved immediately. The increased liquidity, as Prendergast put it, made donors more willing to give, and the supply of food moving through the network rose by 50 million pounds in the first year after the new system’s introduction.

Under the old queue, food banks routinely received items that another food bank valued far more — a mismatch the Chicago team saw everywhere. Idaho might be offered yet another truckload of potatoes when its warehouse was already full, while a different food bank hundreds of miles away was desperate for produce. A food bank heavy on dairy but low on dry goods might be offered more milk it couldn’t refrigerate. Fresh produce often arrived close to expiration, meaning that a single misdirected shipment could spoil before anyone could use it. And food-rich banks, the ones with strong donor networks, often had surplus in the categories that food-poor banks lacked. The market allowed all of this to be reshuffled toward higher-value uses. Prices revealed which food banks needed what, and donations flowed accordingly. It was an example of something Slow Boring readers know well: moral impulses matter, but systems are what make moral impulses effective.

Morgan told me the biggest change wasn’t any single donation but the visibility the system gave her. For the first time, she could see what was being donated nationally and how often certain items appeared. She knew what she already had in her warehouse, what it would cost to bring something to Alaska, and what her community actually wanted.

“I had all of this data that the central clearinghouse didn’t have,” she said. “I could use [it] to make good decisions.”

That meant she could plan instead of react. If apples from Seattle were appearing regularly and surviving the trip north, she could save up just a few shares for them and make sure Alaska had fresh fruit for the holidays. If something was unpopular, like Tupperware lids, the system eventually assigned it a negative price, letting food banks earn shares by taking it.

“It was transformational,” she said. “We could actually change our strategy around what food that we purchased, what food that we got through this system, what food that we tried to get through the government systems, in order to make all of that balance better for the people who are experiencing hunger in Alaska.”

What the future holds

Now, with nearly 20 years of price data behind them, Feeding America is considering whether to evolve the system again. If prices are this stable and predictable, does the network even need an auction? Should they move to something more like a supermarket model, where prices are posted and food banks buy what they want directly, without bidding?

It would be faster, simpler, and more intuitive. But the auction has safeguards that a posted-price system wouldn’t. Right now bids are sealed and only accepted twice a day, which prevents large, well-staffed food banks from hovering over the system and “sniping” high-value loads at the last minute. Share budgets were originally set according to need, so the highest-need food banks entered the market with more purchasing power. And smaller food banks can delegate bids to an employee of Feeding America, where a food bank simply outlines in broad terms its needs to that person, which helps level the playing field. In a shock like this month’s SNAP freeze¹ during the shutdown, when demand jumped overnight, a posted-price system could break down into a first-come, first-served rush. The auction, for all its friction, preserves fairness.

This is the eternal challenge of market design: optimizing for both efficiency and equity at once. The Chicago team solved one version of that tradeoff 20 years ago. Now the charitable network is debating the next version.

What stands out most, though, is how impactful the original choice system turned out to be. It took a sector defined by goodwill, volunteerism, and moral urgency and gave it a structure that made those virtues effective. It replaced guesswork with information, rivalry with trust, and improvisation with planning.

Food banks no longer have to choose between shipping pickles and losing their place in line. They can get the things their communities actually need. Donors know their generosity is used well. And families — millions of them — receive more food than they would have otherwise.

Abundance isn’t just about having more. It’s also about making the most of what we already have. And sometimes, that begins with a market, a handful of shares, and the decision to build a better system.

1. SNAP provides roughly nine meals for every one meal a food bank distributes. Charitable food should be a supplement or emergency patch, not a pillar of American nutrition.