nothin ShopRite Workers Shop ... At Food Pantry | New Haven Independent

ShopRite Workers Shop … At Food Pantry

Sam Gurwitt Photos

Keefe Worker Pat Cabral stocks the pantry.

Tekenya works as a supervisor at ShopRite. She can’t always afford to shop there on the wages she earns, so she sometimes ends up at a food pantry to pick up groceries — that were donated by ShopRite.

In the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, for instance, Tekenya packed stuffing, cranberry sauce, canned pumpkin, and other Thanksgiving foods into bags at the ShopRite on Dixwell Avenue in Hamden. Once the bags were full, she set them out for customers to buy for $10. Once they had been sold, ShopRite employees drove them two and a half miles down Dixwell Avenue to the Keefe Community Center to be donated.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Tekenya showed up at the Keefe Center. There, she picked up a bag with the very stuffing, cranberry sauce, and canned pumpkin she had packed at work a few days earlier.

Had she taken the donated food directly from the store, it would have been considered stealing. At the Keefe Center, however, she was just one of the 623 people who picked up a free Thanksgiving meal this year.

Tekenya makes $350 a week as a part-time front-end supervisor at the ShopRite in Hamden. As a single mother of three, she finds she can’t always stretch that $350 a week, plus food stamps, to pay all the bills. So she comes to the Keefe Center from time to time to augment what she can buy at ShopRite, PriceRite, or Walmart, where she does her grocery shopping. Sometimes she comes home from the Keefe center with the very products she sells to customers at work.

It’s good that we can help,” she said of the donations. She said that she would like to start working full-time. Then, perhaps, she would not have to get food at the Keefe Center.

Tekenya is one of at least three workers at the ShopRite in Hamden who sometimes go to the pantry at the Keefe Center to help put food on the table. Invariably, they end up taking food from time to time that was donated by their employer.

ShopRite is one of the Keefe Center’s most important and generous donors, said Keefe Employee Luz Gonzalez. Every Tuesday, ShopRite donates a large batch of fresh produce. Sue Hudd, a professor at Quinnipiac, picks it up and brings it to the Keefe Center with her students.

The ShopRite produce allows Keefe clients to get nutritious food they could not get otherwise. For example, many clients can’t normally afford to buy asparagus, said Gonzalez. Thanks to ShopRite, they’re able to get it for free at the Keefe Center.

Now everyone wants to come on a Tuesday because of ShopRite,” she said.

ShopRite does more than many food-related businesses to help alleviate food insecurity in Hamden. Not only does it donate more food than most — it is also the 13th largest employer in town.

But while ShopRite’s generous donations allow hundreds of Hamden residents to put food on their tables, its own workers sometimes struggle to feed themselves. Unable to take day-old bread, spotted bananas, or other unsellable items directly from the store, they must instead go to food pantries to pick them up.

A Food Business Phenomenon

Tekenya is one of at least three Keefe Center clients who work at ShopRite. And ShopRite is only one of a few grocery stores in Hamden with workers who come to the pantry. The Keefe Center does not keep data on where its clients work, but staff said they sometimes see their clients working at PriceRite or Save-A-Lot. The PriceRite in Hamden does not donate food, while Save-A-Lot does donate some goods to the Connecticut Food Bank.

Grocery stores generally do not let their employees take any food home, even items that can’t be sold and must be donated or thrown out. Chuck Dow, a baker at the ShopRite in Hamden, said that at the at the end of each day, food pantries and soup kitchens come to pick up stale bread. Produce, too, goes to pantries, while damaged goods go to a reclamation company. Employees, he said, are not allowed to take any of it.

It’s their policy not to give away food to employees,” he said. He said he has heard of employees who were caught stealing food from the store.

ShopRite is committed to the communities where ShopRite stores operate and to store associates and customers,” Wakefern (which operates ShopRite) spokesperson Karen O’Shea wrote in an email to the Independent. Our family-owned stores work closely with Foodshare and the Connecticut Food Bank and myriad local food pantries to get good food to people who need it the most. ShopRite Partners In Caring, ShopRite’s year-round, hunger-fighting initiative, has donated $50 million to more than 2,200 local hunger-fighting charities and regional food banks across all our trading areas since 1999.”

At Save-A-Lot, too, staff are not allowed to take anything, even that which goes to the food bank.

It’s corporate policy,” explained a store manager named Tony, who declined to give his last name. He said he doesn’t know why the policy exists, but he took a guess: if one can of soda breaks and you give it to staff, more cans will mysteriously start to break.

I guess if you go giving people things, they take advantage of it,” he said.

Stop & Shop also does not let its employees take anything home. Stop & Shop’s policy prohibits associates from taking merchandise beyond the point of sale or consuming merchandise that has not been paid for,” Maura O’Brien, a spokesperson for the company, wrote to the Independent. She said that all stores in New Haven County work closely with the Connecticut Food Bank where we donate items like dry grocery and frozen meat on a weekly basis.”

Jorge Cabrera, who represents Stop & Shop workers in UFCW Local 919, said he has had to represent union members in grievance hearings because they took food from the store, which Stop & Shop considers theft. In some cases, the employees actually did steal. In others, he said, they just flat out told me they were hungry.”

Good Policy” Sought

According to the United States Department of Agriculture, 30 – 40 percent of food goes to waste. Though that waste might seem like an opportunity to feed the hungry, the pathway from the kitchen or grocery store to the pantry is not so simple.

The reason ShopRite, Stop & Shop, and Save-A-Lot don’t let their employees take food is that donation law protects donors from liability only if they donate to a nonprofit intermediary, said Connecticut Food Association President Wayne Pesce.

In 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act. The act protects people and institutions who donate food to a nonprofit from civil or criminal liability if the donated good causes harm, as long as there was no intentional misconduct” or gross negligence.” The act does not protect donors who do not donate to a nonprofit intermediary, and donate directly to the needy, however.

According to a fact sheet prepared by the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, direct donations from the donor to needy individuals do not seem to be protected by the Act.”

That means that if ShopRite, Stop & Shop, and Save-A-Lot did allow their employees to take unsellable food home, it could expose them to liability if that food ends up causing harm. Donating it first to the Keefe Center clears them of that risk.

On Jan. 8, Democratic U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and U.S. Sen. Pat Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican, announced the introduction of the Food Donation Improvement Act of 2019. The act would extend liability protections to certain donors who donate directly to the needy, without a nonprofit intermediary, and who sell food at a reduced price. Pesce said the Connecticut Food Association supports the bill.

Even in cases where food establishments do donate to nonprofits, though the donors may be clear of liability, the pantries or soup kitchens that receive the donations may not want everything on offer.

Downtown Evening Soup Kitchen (DESK) Executive Director Steve Werlin told the Independent that as an organization serving food, DESK is under the same requirements as any sort of food establishment.”

Furthermore, the organization has especially high standards for health because of the population it serves. Our internal policy is that the folks we are serving are generally at greater risk in terms of physical ailments or health problems,” he said. If guests were to get sick, he explained, it would be especially dangerous because many of them are homeless. He said that sometimes he turns down offers for donations from restaurants because, as he put it, he would serve that food to his kids, but at the soup kitchen, he has to have a higher standard.

At the Keefe Center, workers make sure that none of the cans they distribute are broken and that no food is unsafe to eat. Thanks to those workers, and donors like ShopRite and Stop & Shop, hundreds of families in Hamden can feed their children. Yet ask anyone who lives or works along Dixwell Avenue in the southern part of town, and they will tell you: The problem is not food waste. It’s income inequality and a lack of economic opportunities.

As Lori Martin of New Haven food recovery non-profit Haven’s Harvest put it, we’re not going to solve food insecurity with excess food. We solve it with good policy.”

One In Eight

On Thursday this week, some of Tuesday’s produce still sat in boxes along the divider that separates the waiting area from the shelves stocked with food at the Keefe Center. Cucumbers layered the bottom of one box, while artichokes, their leaves beginning to turn purple, sat on top. The adjacent box started Thursday full of plantains and tubers, but by the time the two-hour donation window was over, only a few potatoes were left. In the third box was an eclectic mix of dragon fruit, apples, star fruit, limes, and kiwis.

The Keefe Center distributes food three times a week. Over the course of two hours, clients trickle into a room across from the front desk and sit down in the chairs facing a TV screen to wait. On Tuesday, a woman on the screen mixed dough to make dumplings. At a give-out in December, the screen showed a pair of hands chopping onions on a white cutting board.

One by one, Pat Cabral calls clients into the hidden part of the room where boxes, cans, and bags of food are arranged on shelves based on their nutritional value. When Cabral calls a number, one of the waiting clients gets up and walks to the other side of the partition. There, Cabral helps them choose the foods they want.

Last year, the Hamden Hunger Taskforce, an initiative lead by the United Way of Greater New Haven, found that one in eight Hamden residents are food insecure. Gonzalez said the Keefe Center usually serves 200 – 300 people per month, and that number is increasing.

Luz Gonzalez.

Some of those who use the pantry are retired. Without steady income, it helps augment social security or the small pensions some have. Some are disabled veterans, like Lorenzo Vincent. He was in the Navy for six years, after which he had a career as a barber. Without that income, he must rely partly on the Keefe Center for food. Some are students, like Susan Kotey, who is studying at Gateway Community College before she applies to law school and works at a bookstore to make ends meet. Shanata Gaston, a single mother of six, had to quit her warehouse job to take care of her two youngest children, who are disabled. She has been supporting her family with their disability income and with food stamps.

Many of the people who use the pantries at the Keefe Center work. They fall into a category designated by the acronym ALICE: Asset Limited Income Constrained Employed, formerly referred to as the working poor.” According to a 2018 United Way report, nearly 40 percent of Hamden residents are either considered ALICE or live in poverty.

People who come to the Keefe Center for donated food work in all manner of fields. Some are teaching assistants at nearby schools, like Monique and Tailor Coward (pictured above). Others work in furniture stores or gas stations or hair salons. Others are nursing assistants. And some work in restaurants and grocery stores.

Giving It To The People Who Work Right There”

On a Monday in December, Donald Morgan (pictured above) came to the Keefe Center with one of his daughters. He was on a break from his job at DiBella’s Subs in Milford, where he works as a full-time manager for $15 an hour.

As he began to carry food away from the distribution area, his wife showed up to help. She works as a full-time manager at Chipotle for $14 an hour.

We’re barely paying the bills,” he said. Between the mortgage, electricity, car insurance… that’s it.”

Morgan and his wife both graduated from Hamden High School in 2004, and they are raising their three kids in their hometown. They recently bought a house in Hamden.

Morgan said he gets one free meal a day at work. That’s a meal for me,” he said. That’s not a meal for my children.”

Morgan is not the only restaurant worker who must come to the Keefe Center to supplement the food he can buy with the money he earns selling subs. Gonzalez said she knows a McDonald’s worker who has to take the bus to the Keefe Center on her half-hour break. She comes on her break and she picks up her food and she runs out,” she said. 

Lori Martin.

Restaurant workers, like grocery-store workers, frequently make minimum wage. Oftentimes, folks that work around food are the most food insecure in our country,” said Lori Martin. Martin runs Haven’s Harvest, which connects food businesses to pantries and transports donations of excess food to places where it is distributed to the needy.

Martin said that whenever she begins partnerships with food businesses, she tells them to give excess food to employees first, before donating it beyond the establishment. That’s the greenest way to recover food,” she said. Keep it local. And keeping it local means giving it to the people who work right there.”

Despite that request, she said, it is rare to find food businesses that let their employees take excess food. 

Restaurants near the Keefe Center on Dixwell deal with leftovers in different ways.

Ali Baba’s Worker Joelle Hagans.

At Ali Baba’s Fusion, a few doors up the street from the Keefe Center, employees take any leftovers home at the end of the day. On top of that, said Worker Joelle Hagans, employees get free meals when they work.

One worker at Dunkin’ Donuts, who asked to remain anonymous, said that at the end of each day, employees can take leftover donuts. They don’t have a problem with us taking [them] home, but, you know, it can’t be a lot,” she said.

Other restaurants, however, do not allow employees to take anything home. Bobby Singh, a worker at Hing Wah Restaurant, said that workers can eat the restaurant’s food at work, but they cannot take anything away with them without paying.

Erin Wolford, a spokesperson for Chipotle, where Morgan’s wife works, said that workers can buy food at a discount and bring it home. They cannot, however, take any excess food, which Chipotle does donate.

Across the street from the Keefe Center, at Burger King, workers cannot eat anything for free, even on the job, said one worker. They certainly do not let employees take anything home, he said. You have to pay.”

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