No sign identifies Greater Goods, a food pantry located in Northeast Philadelphia, but the spot is still hard to miss. When the storefront is open—six mornings a week— a line of people is almost always waiting outside.
On a Tuesday morning just before Thanksgiving, the line wrapped around the side of the building. Every sort of person was there: mothers with strollers, men in work uniforms, small children, young adults, and seniors with portable grocery carts. Some of those waiting lived in the neighborhood, but others had taken three buses to get there because there seemingly is no corner of Philadelphia that hunger doesn’t touch.
Natasha Rodriguez, a 28-year-old mother with dimples and large brown eyes, stood in the back of the line with her 7-month-old son. Like many of the patrons of Greater Goods, she had spent the first two weeks of November scraping by without her Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, which the Trump Administration paused during the 35-day government shutdown.
Rodriguez said she’d been forced to choose between buying a can of baby formula and some food for the rest of her family. She said she was in better spirits now that SNAP benefits were back, but she still needed Greater Goods because her food stamps weren’t enough to cover the cost of a balanced diet.
“I’m not that type of mom that goes off of just chips and chocolate and candy,” she said, adding that she goes to Greater Goods for vegetables so that she can save her SNAP dollars for meat and baby formula. As she left the store, she flashed a smile and opened her bag, showing off a tall stalk of brussels sprouts.
When SNAP first disappeared, Margaux Murphy, executive director of Greater Goods, said that people around the city began circulating lists of food pantries, bringing more people to Greater Goods, including many who had needed extra food before the shutdown. “SNAP wasn’t solving the whole problem before,” she said.
When patrons step inside Great Goods, they’re met with a burst of warm air and bright light. During the last week of November, the refrigerator was loaded with milk and eggs and there was a special display with Thanksgiving items, including boxed stuffing, mashed potatoes, and cranberry sauce.
Jaizzlyn Arvelo, 29, a volunteer who also shops at the pantry, greeted customers at the entrance with a wide smile, flipping easily between English and Spanish and peppering her sentences with the word “baby.” “Last name, baby? Got you. baby. First name, baby? Y tú, mi vida?” She said, checking customers in with her tablet.
Unlike most pantries, where customers receive a box of goods to-go, patrons at Greater Goods are allotted twenty tokens to shop with each time they visit, which Murphy estimates are worth close to $50 of groceries. A staff member or volunteer guides each patron through the store, collecting their tokens as they pull items from the shelves. The system enables patrons to choose the food they want, making the experience more like shopping at a grocery store and less like a charity.
Many of the patrons interviewed for this article said it’s their favorite food pantry because they can choose from an abundance of high-quality food. Still, some had difficulty deciding how to spend the tokens allotted to them. One woman, who said her jacket and oxygen tank had been stolen the previous week, agonized over whether to spend five tokens—a quarter of her allotment—on a stick of deodorant. Afterwards, she shivered by the door in a T-shirt, while a volunteer ran to the backroom to see if there was a coat in the donation bin they could give her. There wasn’t, so the woman had to step back into the biting cold with nothing but a bag of groceries. This scene underscored a point that Murphy made repeatedly: with a fixed budget and just two full-time staff, Greater Goods can’t meet the needs of every patron.
“I’m not solving this problem on my own,” she said.
Customers waiting in line outside Greater Goods food pantry. (Credit: Kathryn Rice)
All over Philadelphia, there are groups like Greater Goods, going to heroic lengths to get food to the people who need it. The city’s webpage lists 294 different sites offering free food or meals. Many of these sites are smaller and more informal than Greater Goods, and some, like the South Philly Community Fridge, are powered entirely by volunteers. Together they spin a web of delicate threads across the gaping hole in the social safety net.
Other food pantries around the city are also seeing an increase in demand. Prevention Point, a nonprofit in Northeast Philadelphia, added 25 families to its monthly grocery giveaway in November, according to Cari Bender, who manages public relations for the organization. Northwest Mutual Aid Collective, which delivers groceries to homebound people, has seen its client list grow by 30% since Nov. 1, said Linda James-Rivera, the Collective’s executive director.
Hunger is on the rise in Philadelphia. Over the past two years, the number of residents who cannot afford sufficient food rose by 44%, said Maria Raha, the director of marketing and communications for Philabundance, Philadelphia’s largest food bank. The Collective’s James-Rivera said that many people who receive food stamps, such as those receiving Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), are living off a fixed income that hasn’t kept pace with inflation.
But if hunger was a problem before SNAP benefits froze, it’s about to grow worse. President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act mandated changes to SNAP eligibility, including new work requirements that took effect on Nov. 1. Those changes require some groups who were previously exempt from work requirements—such as veterans, parents of teenagers, and foster care youth ages 18 to 24—to work, volunteer, or participate in an education or training program at least 20 hours a week, according to Pennsylvania SNAP officials.
The rules also now require participants to report more often, increasing the risk of paperwork errors, said Anaga Srinivas, a paralegal at Community Legal Services of Philadelphia.
“I’ve seen a lot of SNAP cases of people getting cut off because of paperwork mishaps,” she said. The system for processing SNAP paperwork is cumbersome, according to Srinivas, who explained that the website does not allow recipients to double-check documents they’ve uploaded online. The additional paperwork will also put a strain on the government offices responsible for processing it.
“The County Assistance Offices were already understaffed and this will continue to stretch them,” she said. These obstacles mean that 64% of people subject to the new requirements could lose their benefits, according to the state SNAP website.
As of November, approximately 30% of Philadelphians—roughly 472,000 people—were receiving SNAP benefits, according to Pennsylvania’s Department of Health and Human Services. In Kensington, where Greater Goods is located, those numbers are likely much higher, because city data show that the neighborhood has a poverty rate of 39%, making it one of the poorest neighborhoods in one of America’s poorest cities. Although SNAP benefits are modest, with the maximum monthly payment for an individual being $298, many people in Kensington depend heavily on them. Most patrons at Greater Goods interviewed for this article said SNAP dollars comprised their entire food budget.
Most pantries receive “retail rescue,” a polite term for food items grocery stores can’t sell, either because they are slightly battered or past their expiration dates. Usually, the food is still edible, but not always. One customer, Alize Lopez, 29, said that one of the food pantries she’d visited during the government shutdown gave her rotten meat and a can of spaghetti filled with mold. “The meat is brown, almost purplish brown,” she said. “I know that meat isn’t safe.”
Retail rescue also tends to be less nutritious.
“A lot of it is pastries, baked goods, an excess of bread,” said Greater Goods’ Murphy, who purchases eggs, milk, and other staples to supplement the donated items she receives at the pantry.
On a Sunday in mid-November, a mutual aid group called Homies Helping Homies ran a food distribution table in Wharton Square Park in South Philadelphia. There was music, bonhomie, and an abundance of food—enough for everyone to go through the line twice. Volunteers exchanged smiles with the people passing through the line. A woman in Eagles socks and green-sequined boots danced while she waited for groceries.
But most of the items on the table were simple carbohydrates: bags of English muffins and bagels, boxes of mini muffins and Entenmann’s donuts. The only produce items on the tables were apples and baby carrots and there was no meat. No one in the park that morning went hungry, but no one got all the ingredients for a balanced meal either.
The staff at Homies Helping Homies want to open a free grocery store like Greater Goods, but haven’t been able to secure enough funding, according to Anthony Adams, the group’s Food Distribution Manager. It’s difficult for small organizations like Homies Helping Homies to win grants, said Adams, because there are so many organizations competing for limited funds. “Everybody’s just fighting for pennies,” he said.
Other food pantries in Philadelphia are also struggling to raise enough money. The Greater Philadelphia Coalition Against Hunger, which served as many of 500,000 Philadelphians, closed after 28 years in June 2024 due to lack of funds. The Double Trellis Food Initiative, which provided packaged meals to food programs across the city, closed in October partly due to funding challenges.
As COVID-era funds expire, many foundations have less money to funnel towards anti-hunger programs, said Paula Jones, who is the President of Zia, a nonprofit that delivers meals to Philadelphia families. “Foundations are so inundated with requests from organizations,” said Jones, “because the need to feed people is so much higher than it has been.”
Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker’s One Philly SNAP Support Program, which awarded small grants to food pantries after SNAP froze in early November, provided a temporary boost to some organizations, but the city still lacks a long-term plan for combating hunger.
“They need to figure out a way to have ongoing grants through the city,” said Murphy from Greater Goods. “This is very hard for people who are just nonprofits. We’re running out of people to ask for money.”
About the author(s)
Kathryn Rice is an M.S. student at Columbia School of Journalism.