7 Tips for Donating Products to Food Drives

You know those holiday barrel donation drives your grocery store or school does for your local food bank? Well, those are amazing, and here are some tips you might not know from a long-time insider volunteer.

Did you know that a human volunteer checks every single item donated in those huge barrels? Yep! Every. Single. Can.

Because we spend a lot of time with those items, we come to have a specific love or disdain for the little things, like:

1. Expiration dates. Every single container is inspected for “Best By” dates, which vary from product to product. A best by date is not the same as an expiration, although that’s what most of us call it. Actually, when a product is no longer deemed safe for consumption is complicated and based on a variety of factors. We have a special love for products with clearly printed, contrasting color Best By dates. 5pt dot font? Black ink on a dark package? Again? Argh!!!
2. Glass jars. I know it’s infinitely recyclable (in some places), but every glass jar has to be visually inspected for cracks, hand-wrapped in paper towels, and taped with masking tape. When you are hand-processing a ton of food a day, that gets really tedious. The main reason we hate glass jars, though, is the lone jar of spaghetti sauce in the center of a barrel, that breaks — leaving shards of broken glass, coated in tomato sauce, all over every other item in that barrel. And you know what we do? We hand clean every.single.can. in there because somebody local needs that food, or they will go hungry. But we are secretly cursing that broken glass jar of spaghetti sauce all morning.
3. Canned green beans and corn. Usually, 75–90% of the canned vegetable donations from food drives are canned green beans and corn. Finding a can of fruit or collards is like magic! Our food recipients never complain, because being in a position that you need to reach out to a non-profit to feed yourself or your family is a humbling circumstance. I feel for those families every time I seal up a box with nothing but canned green beans and corn. Donate some canned fruit, y’all.
4. Feminine Hygiene Items. Ok, y’all who donate maxipads, panty liners, and tampons are saints. Let me say that again: y’all who donate feminine hygiene products rule. First of all, if you haven’t bought these necessities for your family recently, they are expensive, and in some states, excessively taxed. While every item donated in any category goes directly to someone local in need, the Tampon Tinkerbelles are the best.
5. Pop-cap plastic shampoo, liquid soap, or lotion bottles. I have a special hatred for pop-cap shampoo and soap bottles. At least when a lotion bottle comes open and spills all over every other item in the one-ton barrel, I can wipe it clean easily. Soap & shampoo, though? I curse you for the HOURS it takes to clean every single item in that barrel. If it’s other plastic bottles, I can rinse them in the sink, but when it’s mixed with toothpaste boxes, canned food, diapers, bags of rice, etc., it takes most of the day to clean all of the other donations from that one cap that popped up and ruined everything. Take the extra moment to TAPE THE LID SHUT before you donate it.
6. Partially used cases of food. If the items inside do not have manufacturer’s Best By dates printed on the containers or packages themselves, the food has to be thrown away. This happens a lot with applesauce squeeze packs from Costco or Sam’s and a particular brand of ramen noodle cup that does not have dates printed on the inner cups. If it’s not a new jumbo pack, it’s probably not the best donation in your pantry.
7. Peanut butter. Did you know that we check every single jar of peanut butter to see if it’s fresh? Yep! We unscrew the lids and check the seals of every single jar of peanut butter (unless it’s got the shrink-wrap plastic band seal). Every time I’ve had peanut butter in one of my barrels, I’ve had at least one that someone had opened the lid and taken a spoonful before donating. We have to trash those.

If you want to know more about how your community food bank functions, you should reach out to them. Their amazing network of donors — both individual and corporate — combined with their existing infrastructure for distribution allows them to directly improve the lives of people in your community.