Through contributions from a food bank, charities and pantries focused on hunger relief can get the food that they need in order to carry out their vital operations. The only way that charities focused on fighting the hunger epidemic can do what they do is if they are able to have a steady supply of produce and bread, and the food bank is the exact resource that they need in order to see this operation through.
There are many different agencies that require food on a regular basis in order to distribute out at their various events, and in most cases, a food bank will serve all of these agencies as a shared nexus for vital food storage. Generally speaking, it is the smaller-scale agencies that tend to rely on a food bank as constant points of supply for the food that they need; however, larger-scale agencies may also make use of their services.
Supplying The Middlemen
As a food bank is more of a supplier than a distributor, they aren't typically engaged in serving food to those who need it in order to survive. While a certain kind of food bank may be seen on the distribution-oriented side of things from time to time, they are most typically involved in arrangements in which they exclusively provide food to middleman agencies between the food bank and people in need of provisions.
Context-Sensitive Needs
Because there are so many different communities with their own unique needs for provisions, a food bank can be seen in a diverse array of potential models. While the average food bank may be on the smaller side due to only needing to serve a small set of food distribution agencies, a food bank may also be very large in scale. In some circumstances, a food bank may be responsible for distributing millions of kilograms of food on a nationwide basis.
The determination of exactly how a food bank operates is highly context-sensitive. Depending on how much food needs to be distributed to the agencies that need what they supply, facilities may be physically sized on the larger or smaller size; because of this, there really is no standard size for any food bank.
In addition to accounting for the physical size of the facility that is needed in order to house all of their goods, the level of activity a food bank engages in is also a big part of the equation. Depending on how often food needs to be traded from the bank to those who distribute it, there may be either a small team or a large team of staff members.
Staying Within Regulatory Compliance
Naturally, food banks need to remain within compliance of certain sanitary and safety regulations in order to remain operational. Though they may not directly distribute their wares to those who ultimately wind up eating the food, it is necessary for the food that they hold to be properly managed and cleaned. Much like any establishment that directly distributes food to consumers, food banks are subject to thorough examinations in order to determine their degree of compliance with safety and sanitation regulations.
The larger that a food bank is, the more people who are needed on-hand in order to manage it in a way that allows it to remain within compliance in the long-term. In the very involved process of keeping a food bank both operational and legally functional, funding is needed on a consistent basis. In order to receive the funding from the state that they need to stay active, food banks may submit grants and appeals for additional support in the same manner that charities do.