Coronavirus: Danbury Food Pantry Struggles To Meet Demands

DANBURY, CT — Usually, when a business tells you its client list has more than tripled inside of a month, it's a happy conversation. But Jill Shaw, who is the pantry coordinator at Daily Bread, one of Danbury's biggest food pantries, isn't smiling.

Shaw's business, a 501-C-3 organization and a member of the Danbury Food Collaborative, is getting squeezed at both ends. The demand for its food has gone through the roof at the same time its supply chain is being frayed by the new coronavirus.

Daily Bread is a member of the Connecticut Food Bank, which amplifies its buying power many-fold. Their truck with Daily Bread's weekly order rolls up every Monday morning to the pantry. Lately, it's taking a lot longer to unload.

"It used to be two, three, four thousand pounds," Shaw said. "The last one that came in was 13 thousand pounds."

It's crazy, but that's still not enough. Shaw said the pantry's client base, pre-pandemic, was 70 families per distribution, with two distributions a week. In the past month those distributions have grown 20-30 families each time. The day before Patch spoke with Shaw, the distribution was 250 families, more than triple the norm. "It's frightening," Shaw said.

In the Good Old Days, like February, outfits such as Daily Bread pretty much had carte blanche to order what their clients needed from the CT Food Bank. Now that state group has announced it will be restricting the local agencies. The change stems in part from kinks even further up in the food chain, most notably the shuttering of some large meat packing plants whose workers have been infected with the virus. The national food shortage, in the midst of all the unemployment caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, finds pantries like Daily Bread just one Horseman shy of an apocalypse.

Even if Gov. Ned Lamont were to open the spigot tomorrow and allow all non-essential businesses to re-open (and that's not happening), a sizable number of Danbury residents will still be behind the financial eight-ball. Some businesses without deep cash reserves have already gone under, or will shortly. Many residents have not yet received unemployment benefits, or their stimulus checks, and need both just to get back on their feet, let alone back into the fight. There's not even any guarantee that residents' old jobs will still exist months from now, as companies scale back and realign for the inevitable post-pandemic recession.

In short, there are way too many variables to properly model the pantry's business over the next months, or as Shaw put it, "We don't know what we don't know." One thing is clear, however: Daily Bread needs food, money and volunteers, and they need them yesterday.

In addition to the weekly drop from the CT Food Bank, Daily Bread is partnered with five supermarkets in Danbury which flash-freeze perishables nearing their due date and donate them to the pantry. But the supermarkets have been pummeled by the same forces that are drying up the Food Bank, and can't donate what they don't have.

Despite the crimp in their supply line the pantry has still held true to its commitment to two food distributions a week, now Mondays from noon to 1:30, and Friday mornings, 10-11:30. They've had to push the Monday distribution into the afternoon to allow volunteers more time to unpack the bigger orders from CT Food Bank .

Food pantry trivia: Canned corn is most in demand. Other high-value items are beans, peanut butter, pasta and rice. You can drop off your sorely needed donations to Daily Bread at their site behind Saint James Church on 25 West Street, or contribute through PayPal on their website.

Patch asked Shaw, given the current refresh rate and unprecedented rate of demand, how long can Daily Bread hold out?

She laughed: "The Board is divided on that. Some people are very concerned we are going to run out of food. I'm not one of them. I believe in the community."

Shaw said there is no doubt it's going to be tight, but she is adamant about not closing the doors:

"We are compelled to feed the hungry."