Buying food from farmers who might otherwise be forced to dump it and sending it to people who need food sounds like a win-win. Trust the Trump administration to find a way to insert some lose into it. A program to distribute fresh food boxes to people in need is facing sharp criticism from produce companies after the Trump administration gave big contracts to a number of companies with no real food distribution experience while leaving out many companies that do have the relevant experience.
A Texas event-marketing company named CRE8AD8 (“create a date”) got the seventh-largest contract in the program for $39.1 million. A California “business finance solutions” company got a $16.6 million contract. A company that sells hand sanitizers and lotions in airports got a $12 million contract. Meanwhile, many of the top produce distributors didn’t get contracts. “This deal is destined to crash before it takes off,” a Houston produce distributor who didn’t get a contract told Politico.
The president of Baldor Specialty Foods, an actual food distributor, told Politico he looked at the program and decided it wasn’t worth applying—but that some of the companies that did get contracts have since come to him wanting to subcontract that work. Funnily enough, it turns out that distributing perishable food is not like bringing some cans of soup and tuna to your local food bank. It requires refrigeration trucks and rigorous food safety procedures.
The United Fresh Produce Association has sent the Department of Agriculture a long list of questions about the process by which contracts were awarded, noting: “This is not ‘sour grapes’ from those that may not have been awarded; this is a genuine effort to ensure integrity and confidence in the program and that fresh produce actually gets to those in need in an efficient and cost-effective way.”
At the other end of this program, the food banks that are expected to receive the boxes and then distribute them to families in need have also expressed concerns about their ability to store the large influx of perishable food, with one food bank president telling The New York Times: “We are going to have a lot more use for refrigerated trucks.”