Monmouth Medical Center Opens Food Pantry For Patients Who Qualify

LONG BRANCH, NJ — This week, Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch opened a "Food Farmacy" inside the hospital.

Located inside the Alexander Pavilion, the food pantry is intended to provide patients with nutritious foods. It will have New Jersey-grown produce, refrigerated items and shelf-stable foods, all of which will be offered free to hospital patients who qualify.

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The pantry is run in partnership with Fulfill food bank, which provides food for nearly 300 Monmouth County food pantries, soup kitchens and shelters.

Patients will also receive individualized nutrition counseling from registered hospital dietitians. Monmouth Medical Center is owned and operated by RWJBarnabas Health, which runs five other similar "food pharmacies" at other hospitals it owns across New Jersey.

In the future, Monmouth Medical Center will downsize, with the bulk of the hospital services relocating to Tinton Falls. Congressman Frank Pallone (D-NJ6) was highly critical of the move last year, but on Tuesday, he was all smiles at the opening of the food pharmacy.

"This partnership will help families put nutritious food on the table while giving patients the support they need to prevent disease and manage chronic health conditions," said Pallone, who has represented Monmouth County in Congress for 37 years. "I'm proud to see this program implemented in Long Branch to improve health and strengthen our community."

In the future, Monmouth Medical Center will relocate to a new 36-acre medical campus in Tinton Falls. The medical campus is called the Vogel medical campus and it will be located on Pearl Harbor Avenue at Corregidor Road. It will be visible from the Parkway. Here's a rendering of how the new home of Monmouth Medical Center will look.

A five-story cancer center will be located next door; that's the building you can already see from the Parkway.

The new hospital is not expected to open until 2032, but the cancer center will open first. It is expected to open as early as February 2027, Patch reported last month.

RWJBarnabas Health is moving labor & delivery to its new Tinton Falls medical campus, plus all cardiac and stroke care, surgery that requires overnight stays and the Unterberg Children's Hospital will also relocate there.

RWJ will slash the size of the existing Monmouth Medical Center campus in Long Branch by 65 percent. MMC is currently one million square feet, and RWJ plans to tear down buildings and reduce it to 345,000 square feet. RWJBarnabas declined to say which buildings it plans to tear down, but it will most likely be the oldest buildings on its Long Branch campus, which is more than 100 years old.

Lobbying from Pallone resulted in the New Jersey Department of Health requiring RWJBarnabas Health to still offer some acute-care hospital services in Long Branch for at least 10 years after Monmouth Medical Center relocates to Tinton Falls.

The state of New Jersey is requiring RWJ to keep an ER and surgery rooms in Long Branch indefinitely. RWJ is also required to keep some intensive care hospital beds in Long Branch. But Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch will look very different once all the changes go through; see these renderings.

Tinton Falls Cancer Center Will Open In February 2027 (August 2026)

Monmouth Medical Center Gets Final Clearance To Move To Tinton Falls (January 2026)