When Rhinelander Area Food Pantry’s general manager, Jane Motowski, goes grocery shopping, she buys food in bulk.
But this year, she’s having trouble.
Normally she can special order pallets of flour and sugar, but she says most local stores aren’t taking those requests anymore.
“They’re trying to make sure there’s food on their shelves for people,” she says. “You know, everybody has to eat!”
Without those special orders, Motowski has to pull food from grocery store shelves like a normal customer.
Even then, she can’t always get enough of what she needs.
“I went in to one grocery store to buy cases of peas, and they normally have a space of about three cases wide and three deep, so there’s usually 50 or 60 cases there,” she says. “They had one can of peas sitting there.”
On top of that, food prices are going up.
It all presents a special challenge to the food pantry just in time for the holidays, when the pantry typically sees a spike in demand as people seek to fill their holiday tables.
For Thanksgiving, the pantry partnered with Trig’s and Feeding America to give out vouchers for turkeys.
But the vouchers were delayed by weeks.
“They couldn’t get us the vouchers until they knew for sure they would have the turkeys,” Motowski says.
Now, just weeks before Christmas, the pantry is in the same boat with Christmas hams.
