Susan King is president and CEO of Feeding Northeast Florida, which has been a beneficiary of generosity by THE PLAYERS Championship.
Tell me about Feeding Northeast Florida.
Feeding Northeast Florida is the Feeding America affiliate food bank here in Northeast and North Central Florida. We cover 12 counties. We go all the way to Levy County over on the Gulf Coast. And from Flagler up to Nassau over to Baker. There are a little over 8,300 square miles, the size of New Jersey!
We are, at our heart and soul, a logistics warehouse and distribution business. We are a fleet of about 25 refrigerated trucks. We have everything from semi-tractor trailers to 26-foot box trucks. And we literally are moving food from where it exists to where it needs to be, which is on the tables of families in need.
That is accomplished primarily with our agency partnerships and programs, which number over 490 in that 12-county area. And maybe something as big as a Sulzbacher or City Rescue Mission and something as small as a pantry in a church. Even school pantries that we operate in conjunction with the Duval County School System. So, everything in between.
We’re the people that provide the food that gets distributed through all those agencies that are frontline.
How do you manage all that?
I think you grow into it. I used to run BEAM, out at the Beach, for almost seven years. And we were distributing through our pantry operation a little over a million pounds a year. And as we grew to that point, I was just overwhelmed with: This is so much food! And we did 36 million pounds here last year.
But we’re not operating pantries, distributing it. Although we do mobile pantries, and we do programming internally – nutrition programs and that kind of thing. But, we’re just making it possible for other organizations to do the distributing. Which works really well, because they know the communities that they’re serving. They know the cultural preferences. They know the ages and the demographics that they are serving.
So, it’s a great partnership.
How does the food come to you?
About 65% of the food we distribute currently – and this model does change over time – it comes through retail donation. So, if you imagine that every grocery store has what potentially could be waste, and if they donate it early enough, we can make it available for families. Because it’s still perfectly good.
That said, we strictly adhere to the USDA’s dating standard. So, while I might eat an expired can of green beans at home, we don’t necessarily make those foods available to our pantries. So, we’re a little stricter than we might personally be, but we’re within the standards that the USDA sets.
So, most of it comes through the retail donations. Sometimes those are larger donations that come from manufacturers, but we pick up about 350 stores in our 12-county service area. Most of those require that they be picked up three days a week.
So, we also work with some of our larger agency partners to pick up the stores directly, rather than us sending a truck to Flagler to pick up Publix and deliver it down the street to an agency. We help build capacity in our agency partners by providing them coolers and freezers and storage. I think we have a fleet of about 12 refrigerated trailers, those pull-behind trailers that have generators on them, so we help enhance both their pantries and their transportation, so that they can directly pick up food.
Because if you think about it, if they pick it up today, and they’re just blocks away, not counties away, they can get that food safely on a family’s table by the next day.
If we do it, a lot of time we’re losing up to three days of life on that food. So, we try very hard to make it available directly to our agencies, even if we have to go pick it up and deliver it directly to the agency rather than bringing it back to our warehouse.
We also have funding through the USDA for some programs, in particular TEFAP [The Emergency Food Assistance Program], which is the emergency food program that’s been around probably since the ‘40s. The old “block of cheese” program, we lovingly refer to is as. But it supports farmers in various commodities, and we get about somewhere between 10 and 12 million pounds a year that come through that program.
We also buy a lot of food directly from Florida farmers in a program called Farmers Feeding Florida. That is a state appropriation. And that is a wonderful way to support farmers. We pay them in what we call pick-and-pack-out fees. It’s enough to compensate them and motivate them to not plow under the food. I will tell you that I’ve never met a farmer that wasn’t nearly in tears when they had to plow under a field that they had grown.
It’s a great program supported in the state budget. And that provides a couple million pounds a year of fresh, Florida-grown produce.
And then, we’ll have various other programs. We write a lot of grants for food purchases, for the things that don’t come through the recovery system. Pantries very much want to be able to provide a broad array of product for the people that they’re serving. So, a lot of time, there’s only so much peanut butter that gets donated in the world, but there’s always a demand for peanut butter. So, we buy tractor trailer loads of peanut butter.
Everything’s in very large quantities.
How can people help out?
Our website is probably the best place, although we’re getting ready to launch a brand new one, which will be so much better than our existing one.
You can volunteer with us, which is wonderful. We had over 16,000 volunteers last year, more than 60,000 volunteer hours. And that can be an individual who goes on the website and signs up for a shift and they come to our warehouse or to one of our distributions.
At the warehouse, you’re typically going to be sorting food that’s donated, repacking food -- sometimes the produce that we get is in really huge pallet sizes, so we repackage those bulk bins of potatoes into a size that a family can use. That’s a great way to do it.
If you volunteer at a mobile pantry, you have direct client contact, because you’re helping them get food at a particular site. That’s always a wonderful experience.
And we have a few other roles where people can volunteer. I always say I can do way more with a dollar than somebody can at a grocery store, so financial support is incredibly important. We don’t have revenue streams, so that’s always important.
So, volunteering, donating, advocating are really important.
How does Feeding Northeast Florida benefit from THE PLAYERS?
THE PLAYERS has been a supporter of the food bank since we started this. We are the youngest food bank in the Feeding America network. We just celebrated our 10th anniversary. Most food banks are between 40 and 50 years old and started as pantries and grew into food bank operations and then became a part of Feeding America.
We stood up this food bank and I was a founding board member when a predecessor food bank lost their contract with Feeding America and we found ourselves as a community that did not have a food bank -- and clearly all of the donated products that goes along with that.
So, along with local philanthropy and some help from Feeding America, we stood up this food bank 10 years ago. And since the beginning, THE PLAYERS has been a supporter of the food bank. We have benefitted from the tournament when there’s been leftover food.
When COVID first hit, and you’ll remember March 13 of 2020 when THE PLAYERS canceled the tournament, that moment for us was a light switch. I got a call. I’m sure that Billy (Horschel) had made the recommendation. I’m certain of it. And they asked if we would take all of the food that was going to be served at the clubhouse that weekend. And I, of course, said yes and went the next morning, and Billy and is wife Brittany were there along with the kitchen staff and the chefs and everybody who loaded kind of fire-style into one of our small trucks and then, over the next 36 hours, we had three-and-a-half tractor trailer loads of food delivered to our warehouse.
That was just the tip of the iceberg. It was unbelievable. The amount of food, the quality of food, but it was all in large catering size. Imagine a whole salmon marinating! Just big, big, big pans. And pallet after pallet after pallet of it.
So, we triaged at our warehouse. We got everything sealed and wrapped and into our freezers that we could, and the next day, I got a call from John Inseta, who owns the Black Sheep Restaurant Group, and he shared that he was going to have to lay off 150 of his employees that week.
So, we conjured up a plan where his father, who had a foundation, would send us – because we were a 501(c)3 – a donation and we launched what we eventually called Project Share, which was a partnership with restaurants that were technically closed because of the pandemic. We hired their restaurant staff to produce meals for us using the food that initially came from THE PLAYERS.
Within three weeks’ time, we had nine restaurants on board and Florida Blue not only let us use their commercial kitchens, but they continued to pay their more than 40 food service employees to produce meals for us.
So, you can imagine it was kind of “Chopped” on steroids. The kitchens didn’t know what they were going to be getting. But we have a couple of chefs who are dieticians on our staff, and they would figure out what to send to create balanced, healthy meals. But it was up to the restaurant or Florida Blue to come up with what that was.
At the end of 11 months, we had produced over 650,000 meals, which were distributed primarily to low-income senior housing, like Cathedral Towers downtown, Pablo Towers out at the Beach.
It was life-changing. It was transformational for our organization, and I think for the community that we serve, because we realized that: I can’t just give somebody an eggplant or a beautiful fresh cabbage and them necessarily be able to cook that, to prepare it, for it to be appropriate for the family. But if you can support people with a healthy prepared meal, maybe in addition to what they cook themselves, you have just made enormous progress in helping to solve the food insecurity issue.
We just moved into a new facility back in June of last year and we are putting in a large commercial kitchen to continue this as part of the work that we do. It’s prepared meals and prepped meals in addition to the distribution of products.
I give credit to THE PLAYERS. You know, we launched something extraordinarily important and, like I said, transformational through their help. Just with them making that call that said, “Will you take this?” And us collectively figuring out what to do with it.
So, they have been really amazing partners in this work and they continue to be.
That Sunday morning that would have been the final day of THE PLAYERS, we had a lot of their leadership and the chefs and they came and we did distributions at the homeless shelters downtown. There were hundreds of sandwiches and prepped stuff that couldn’t go into a freezer. So, they came and handed out sandwiches and food and drink.
You know, we all felt so lost [during COVID], but it gave everybody collectively a kind of focus for a time. It was just such an important thing, and I credit them for even thinking about others when they were having to cancel a tournament.
Let me ask a little bit about you. Have you lived in Northeast Florida long?
I have lived in Atlantic Beach for almost 40 years. I transferred from New Orleans office of KPMG – I’m a CPA by trade -- and met my now-husband of 39 years a couple of weeks after I got here, not really ever intending to stay in Jacksonville. But here I am!
I love Jacksonville. I raised two kids here. It’s been a great life. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
What do you like best about this area?
Well, I’ve always lived at the beach. I would have to say that. But it’s also such a wonderful sense of community. I love watching the city start to grow; it’s taken a little bit longer than anyone would have hoped. But it’s just a friendly, welcoming place, and people do good.
And it’s been a great place to work in the nonprofit sector. It’s a very collaborative space. The nonprofits work together really well. We’re all trying to solve problems and not be siloed.
Anything else?
You know, I want to emphasize how important THE PLAYERS is to our community in what they do. And sometimes, they’re really quiet about it. They’re so supportive.
I will also share that one of my past board chairs, who’s still a board member for us – Len Brown – is on their staff and has just been a staunch supporter of our organization.
