Our mission is to provide nutritious foods to Delawareans in need and facilitate long-term solutions to the problems of hunger and poverty through community education and advocacy.

We work to achieve this, primarily in Delaware, by:

• Providing low- and no-cost food to qualified feeding programs throughout the greater Delaware region;
• Informing the greater Delaware community about hunger issues and food security;
• Mobilizing support for anti-hunger efforts;
• Training and empowering under- and unemployed individuals to fill needed positions within the foodservice, warehousing/logistics, and agricultural industries;
• And developing and implementing statewide nutrition programs to assist low-income families, individuals and children.

The Food Bank of Delaware, a member of Feeding America, formerly America’s Second Harvest, is a statewide nonprofit agency whose vision is a community free of hunger.

The Food Bank’s beginnings can be found at Westminster Presbyterian Church where Retha Fisher, Director of Community Services, formed a Food Closet Study Committee in 1977 to help improve the church’s hunger-relief efforts. Four years later Food Conservers, Inc., was established (name later changed to the Food Bank of Delaware).

We have grown from humble beginnings as an organization who served 50 agencies out of a basement in the Northeast State Social Service Center in Wilmington to a statewide hunger-relief organization with operations in both Newark and Milford. Today we are the only facility in Delaware with the equipment, warehouse and staff to collect donations from all sectors of the food industry and safely and efficiently redistribute them to those who need it most.

While we know that there is a growing need for hunger-relief programs in the state of Delaware, we also recognize the need to think beyond traditional hunger-relief methods and provide programs that give low-income people the skills needed to earn a living wage so that they no longer have to rely on support from agencies like us.