Supply chain shortages strain New Jersey schools and food banks

A pandemic-era squeeze that never fully went away

In late 2021, NJ Spotlight News ran a report under the heading "Schools, food banks wrestle with shortages, supply problems." It appeared alongside coverage of retailers struggling to hire seasonal workers and stock their shelves. The reporting from that period, across several New Jersey outlets, shows how the global supply chain breakdown reached the state's cafeterias and food pantries. That story is worth revisiting now. Most of the shocks from 2021 have faded, but the cost structure they left behind has not. A newer round of disruption, driven by policy rather than shipping, is now landing on the same institutions.

The outlets that covered the 2021 crisis broadly agreed on what was going wrong. Prices were climbing, some products could not be found at any price, and getting food from warehouses to the people who needed it had become slower and more expensive. Where the coverage differed was mostly in emphasis. School-focused reporting dwelt on menus and staffing. Food bank reporting dwelt on purchasing budgets and trucks.

Food banks: from free inventory to paying full price

The biggest structural change was a collapse in donated food. Before the pandemic, the Community FoodBank of New Jersey bought only about 10% of the food it handed out. By late 2021 it was buying as much as 36%, because supermarkets dealing with their own shortages had less left over to donate.16 An earlier editorial described the same pattern at the very start of the crisis. In spring 2020, the food bank's donations fell about 55%, and it had to buy food it once received for free, at above-normal prices.20

Carlos Rodriguez, the food bank's president, said that early on the organization was paying 20% to 25% more for basic staples. He described those price swings as something staff had to manage every day.16 The shortages kept moving from one product to another. At one point it was aluminum cans; later it was apple concentrate, an ingredient Rodriguez said turned out to be in a surprising number of products.16

Smaller groups ran into similar problems. Nourish.NJ in Morristown could not find bone-in chicken because Tyson Foods was having supply problems, so it bought more expensive boneless chicken. The same group saw a case of kitchen gloves go from roughly $38 to $80 in 18 months.16 The Center for Food Action in Englewood had trouble finding apple juice boxes for its weekend snack packs for children.16

The turkey shortage that Thanksgiving made the problem easy to see. Carlos Roldan, who runs three north Jersey pantries for Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Paterson, said retail turkey prices had nearly doubled to $40–$50. He said his organization had money to buy more birds but could not find them, and he blamed poultry workers leaving the industry during COVID-19.14 That point matters for how to read the episode. In some cases the shortage was a real physical shortage, and more money would not have fixed it.

Logistics: the cost that doubled

Transportation is where the supply chain story turns into a story about operating costs. Fred Wasiak, president of the Food Bank of South Jersey, said the organization's food and distribution costs had doubled since the start of the pandemic.14 The Community FoodBank waited more than a year for half a dozen 26-foot trucks because of the semiconductor shortage. In the meantime it rented vehicles, which cost more over time.16

Vendors became less reliable too. Nourish.NJ described suppliers calling to push deliveries back a day because they had no driver, and staff sometimes drove to wholesalers to pick up orders themselves.16 Some vendors started requiring larger minimum orders because they were short on drivers. That hit hardest at organizations without warehouse space, which had to keep refrigerated trucks running until food could be handed out.16 The Community FoodBank went the other way and leased an extra warehouse so it could overstock as a hedge against shortages.16

These adjustments share a common thread. Each one traded a supply chain risk for a fixed cost: extra storage, rented trucks, bigger orders, staff time spent on pickups. That is why the costs persisted after the ports cleared.

Schools: shorter menus and emergency contracts

School cafeterias faced the same shortages plus a labor problem. Chalkbeat reported that some New Jersey districts were cutting back lunch menus or buying pre-made meals because of supply chain problems and staff shortages.18 The School Nutrition Association listed the effects as higher prices, discontinued products, and late or incomplete deliveries. It said some schools were filling gaps with pizza shops and supermarkets.18

In Bridgeton, food services director Warren DeShields said distributors were running out of chicken patties as well as plates, bowls and bags. He was repeating menu items, substituting proteins and trying new vendors.18 Newark, the state's largest district, approved a $3.9 million emergency purchase of prepared meals from Whitsons Food Service Corp., plus about $127,000 for utensils. Board documents cited supply chain hardships and staffing problems.18 Students and parents complained publicly about the quality of the food.18

Washington stepped in at the time. USDA loosened rules and promised $1.5 billion to help cafeterias cope.18 By spring 2022, the state Department of Agriculture said school food operators were still dealing with supply chain and pricing problems and pointed to federal supply chain assistance funding as the response.15

Inflation kept the pressure on

In hindsight, the 2021 coverage was correct that the crisis would last longer than the shipping backlog. By September 2022, with inflation at a 40-year high, food banks were again serving people at pandemic levels. The Food Bank of South Jersey was feeding more than 90,000 people a month, up from 59,000 in January of that year.19 The Community FoodBank said federal commodities such as ground beef and chicken were running about 1 million pounds below the previous year, so it had to buy more food itself. Increased state funding helped it absorb that cost.19

Rising food costs did not reverse. Feeding America's 2024 analysis found food insecurity in New Jersey had risen 22%, and the average meal in the state cost $4.19, up 5% in a year.8

The new disruption is policy

The local purchasing programs created after the pandemic were partly meant to prevent a repeat of 2021. In its FY2026 budget responses, the state Department of Agriculture described the Local Food Purchase Assistance and Local Food for Schools programs as a way to shorten the supply chain by connecting food banks and schools directly with nearby farms.2 The same document said food insecurity was still being driven by lingering supply chain disruptions, rising transportation and energy costs, and tariffs.2

In March 2025, USDA canceled both programs. New Jersey lost $26 million, including $9.9 million for food banks and $16.2 million for school meals.4 Sal Valenza of the School Nutrition Association of New Jersey said the cut meant a loss of value, not just money.13 The state agriculture department said there was no immediate effect on school meals. It warned, though, that farmers who had bought equipment and set up delivery routes for schools now faced financial risk.2 Reporting from elsewhere made the tradeoff clear: buying local, minimally processed food costs much more than ordering from a distributor, and many schools cannot afford it without the subsidy.7

Other losses followed. The Community FoodBank reported 20% to 25% less food from USDA and was trying to replace it with state aid and retail donations.11 In Paterson, CUMAC faced a projected $250,000 deficit and record demand. Leaders worried that tariffs would lead stores to buy less, leaving less surplus food to rescue.17 Rutgers economist Tom Prusa warned that cuts to SNAP would increase demand at food banks at the same moment their supply was shrinking.17 During the fall 2025 federal shutdown, the state provided $900,000 in emergency aid to six food banks as roughly 813,000 SNAP recipients lost their benefits.12 In June 2026, Governor Mikie Sherrill's office said SNAP changes had already pushed tens of thousands of residents off the program, which makes school meals even more important.5

What it adds up to

The main lesson from the 2021 coverage is that a shortage at a food bank also shifts costs onto it. When donations fall, a nonprofit that used to distribute surplus food becomes a buyer in a market where prices are rising and delivery is unreliable. That happened in 2020 and 2021, when retail surplus disappeared. It is happening again now through cuts to federal commodities and local purchasing programs instead of port congestion. In both cases, food banks and schools end up paying more for food and for the trucks, storage and staff needed to move it, while demand grows.

The outcome is also uneven. Large regional food banks can lease warehouses and buy in bulk. Small pantries and nonprofits that rely on vendor deliveries cannot. School districts with tight budgets fall back on distributor products and prepared meals, even though they would prefer local food. New Jersey has repeatedly filled gaps with state funding, and that has worked so far. It still leaves the state's emergency food network depending on a budget line instead of a more resilient supply chain.