Franklin food pantry uses 'food rescue' to weather hard times

By Anna Cecil, TheStatehouseFile.com

Outside the small, industrial-looking building off Commerce Road in Franklin, a long line of cars waited in the rain to receive their groceries for the week.

Volunteers weaved between vehicles and raindrops, dodging exhaust fumes, to provide drivers with a menu to fill out. The list included protein options, canned, bagged and boxed foods, frozen fruit and soup, milk, eggs, deli meat, snacks, bread and coffee.

Behind the wheel of her old pickup truck, Angela Nelson circled the choices for her family of nine, stopping at the very last option, a line where she could write her “one wish list item.”

On Nov. 7, she asked for a birthday cake for her son.

At Interchurch Food Pantry of Johnson County, birthday cake is possible because of an intricate system the pantry calls “food rescue.” Rescuing food allows Executive Director Carol Phipps and her team not only to keep Central Indiana residents nourished and fed but also supplied with a little joy in the form of a sweet treat.

This is food pantry resilience, honed over decades of government shutdowns, swings in the economy, fluctuations in donors and funding and volunteers, and changes in federal food support—and in this way, the Interchurch Food Pantry is not unique.

Food pantries in Indiana and across the country look to local grocers, college students, churches, K-12 schools, restaurants and bakeries for donations of food, or grow their own on rooftop gardens, or spend hours writing grant requests to stay afloat.

Experts say this is how it has to be.

“Any sector you’re in, we are trying to figure out how to piece multiple streams of resources together to meet ever-growing needs,” said Chris Bernard, president and CEO of Hunger Free Oklahoma. “You need an array of resources to rely on because no single one can really meet that total demand. … It helps create stability, rather than up and down chaos, which is much harder to manage when you’re trying to meet basic needs.”

He added that benevolent support can vary depending on the political climate.

“When it's a hot-button issue, you might have as many volunteers as you can handle and more. But when the public’s attention gets focused somewhere else, you might be struggling,” Bernard said. “The folks who do this, do it well. They understand logistics and they understand how to leverage resources.”

Local approaches to a national issue

Indiana’s food pantries are not alone. For example, in Washington state, they are also straining to meet spiking needs, exacerbated as elsewhere by the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, new enrollment requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the last government shutdown.

And they are approaching the problem creatively. In Seattle, a food pantry located in a college dormitory feeds over 700 students and faculty from the University of Washington each week while a senior center downtown offers bingo games in addition to groceries. Another food bank gives away produce from its rooftop garden.

In New Mexico, where some 350,000 people face food insecurity, a third of them children, church groups stock inner-city pantries while community organizations work to bring water to those living on desert reservations.

In Indiana, Feeding America reports that one in seven people face hunger. The state as a whole has a 12.6% food insecurity rate, with 299,260 Hoosiers regularly going hungry, according to Gleaners Food Bank.

In Marion County, the least rural part of the state, SNAP provides half of the meals for people who utilize food benefits, according to Indy Hunger Network. On top of that, half of the county’s residents told Indy Hunger Network they were facing food insecurity in a 2025 survey.

Interchurch Food Pantry of Johnson County, which is located just outside of Marion County, was serving about 1,000 households per week as of September, a 21% increase over last year.

The pantry helps families like Nelson, who visit for groceries and even sweet treats like a birthday cake.

As demand rises, the pantry has observed a noticeable lull in supply from Gleaners, the food bank where Interchurch receives some commodities through the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP). In 2024, the pantry received 10,000 to 41,000 pounds of food each month from Gleaners. As of late last year, it has maxed out at about 20,000 pounds. This is largely because TEFAP and other federal food assistance programs had their funding slashed by President Donald Trump’s administration.

Phipps said if government commodities completely went away, the pantry would lose about $500,000 worth of food per year. But she has remained optimistic. She is able to call on her decades-long experiences with food rescue initiatives, which help Interchurch keep up with demand despite fewer goods from government-backed sources.

Strategic and coordinated

This is exactly how her pantry does it:

Early in the morning, three days each week, two Interchurch volunteers will hop in a van and travel to schools in two central Indiana districts. Some mornings, they will make nearly 20 stops.

These volunteers, according to Phipps, are strategic. They work with food service coordinators to organize precise pickup times similar to the way buses pick children up for school.

The van drivers also have memorized routes they take to avoid morning traffic, which helps them stay on time. Phipps said drivers have to be on time because there is often cold or frozen food, like milk and or chicken nuggets, that schools don’t have room to store and need to be transported to the pantry in a timely manner.

While these routes are strategic and precise, pick-ups aren’t executed perfectly every day. Sometimes, a food service coordinator from a school will call Phipps if a driver is later than usual or seems to have missed their stop. Phipps then has to call the driver. In other cases, a school might not have anything for Interchurch to pick up, so the coordinator will contact Phipps, and she will relay to the driver not to stop there that day.

“There’s communication and things that have to happen to make this all work, but believe me, it is well worth it,” Phipps said.
 

When the vans return to the pantry from their trip, they unload and another team of volunteers does the more tedious work of sorting and repackaging food to make sure it is up to health department standards so it is ready to be distributed.

By the end of the day, Phipps said over 80% of food rescued from schools is sent to the homes of families who need it.

Interchurch also rescues food from local grocery stores, which is where birthday cakes, cheesecakes, cupcakes and other sought-after sweets come from.

Phipps said this type of food rescue takes a little more training for her volunteers.

Instead of driving a van, volunteers take box trucks so that they can transport larger quantities of food. Before a volunteer is able to do the grocery store route, they have to complete box truck training, which ensures they are able to back the truck into a loading dock and handle a larger vehicle.

Phipps only has six box truck drivers.

“Box truck drivers, we value them so much,” Phipps said. “I mean, these are all volunteers. These are not paid guys.”

The grocery pick-up route is similar to the school one. Each day of the week, there is a different driver who knows their specific route. They arrive at the pantry early in the morning and have to leave for their first run by 7 a.m.

They rescue food until the truck is full. It holds 12 pallets, which is usually over 1,000 pounds of food per pallet.

The driver takes the food back to the pantry, and a volunteer who is trained to use a forklift unloads the food from the truck. Then, usually, they have to go on another trip to stop by more stores.

Stopping at stores and schools helps Interchurch have more variety for Johnson County residents, but it also highlights the importance of the pantry having a variety of food sources.

The work of Interchurch benefits members of the community who do not even make the weekly trip to the food drive-thru.

“I share with a lot of people. (The pantry) can’t reach everybody, you know, so I got a place in my garage where my neighbors and people that I know are in need, they can come over and get it,” Chris Catt said.

Whether it is birthday cake, fresh produce, an Einstein's bagel or Costco cheesecake, the creativity and resourcefulness of food pantries are touching more and more lives.

The Nov. 7 Interchurch drive-thru hosted Hoosiers who may have been furloughed or lost their SNAP benefits as a result of the government shutdown. One woman shed tears as a volunteer approached her with a menu.

She told him this was her first time using a pantry.

Anna Cecil is a reporter for TheStatehouseFile.com, a news site powered by Franklin College journalism students. Annika Hauer, Elizah Rendorio and Florian Knowles contributed to this report through the Statehouse Reporting Project, a collaborative effort by collegiate journalism programs across the country.