A new $7.5 million U.S. Department of Agriculture funding program will target a practical constraint in emergency food distribution: having enough refrigerated equipment to receive, store and move perishable products.
The Cold Chain Grants for Emergency Food Assistance program can ultimately provide individual food-assistance operations with grants of $10,000 to $200,000 for equipment ranging from walk-in coolers and freezers to refrigerated vehicles and mobile cooling units.
Food banks and pantries, however, are not applying directly to USDA for that money in the current funding round.
Instead, USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service plans to select between one and four nonprofit organizations to administer competitive subaward programs. Prime awards are expected to range from $2 million to $7.5 million over an anticipated two-year period, with at least 80% of each federal award passed through to competitive cold-chain subawards.
That structure means the immediate October 1 application deadline applies to organizations seeking to administer the funding. Individual food banks, pantries, faith-based organizations and other eligible nonprofits will apply later through the organizations selected by USDA.
For warehouse and cold-chain operators, the program’s equipment rules are broader than the headline emphasis on cold storage suggests.
Eligible equipment can include refrigerators, walk-in coolers and freezers, refrigerated vehicles, mobile cooling trailers and combined cooler/freezer units. USDA also allows certain ancillary equipment when necessary to support the principal cold-chain investment.
That can include pallet jacks and forklifts, shelving, preparation and bagging tables, insulated containers, scales and labeling equipment. Backup generators and external battery systems can also qualify, as can enhanced temperature-monitoring devices.
The program therefore addresses both static storage and the logistics required to handle and transport temperature-sensitive food. USDA is targeting fresh, frozen and minimally processed products distributed through emergency food-assistance networks.
The grants are not, however, a funding route for building new refrigerated warehouses.
USDA excludes land and building purchases, new construction and structural building changes. New concrete pads and other ground-disturbing work are also outside the program, along with routine building maintenance, general staffing and operating expenses.
Subaward applicants must instead have the physical infrastructure required to install the equipment they request, including relevant electrical and plumbing capacity, permitting and pads where necessary.
That positions the funding primarily as an equipment retrofit and capacity-addition program for existing food-assistance facilities rather than a cold-storage development program.
Individual subawards can run for no more than 12 months and require recipients to provide a 10% cash cost share. The prime nonprofit organizations administering the program do not face a corresponding cost-share requirement.
The operational focus reflects a particular problem in emergency food logistics. Organizations equipped primarily for shelf-stable inventory may not have the refrigeration, handling or transport capacity required to take larger quantities of meat, seafood, dairy, produce and other temperature-sensitive products.
USDA’s funding notice identifies food-assistance locations with little or no existing refrigerated or freezer capacity as a priority and also points to increased receipt or purchasing of fresh and frozen foods as a program objective.
The department has not quantified how much additional refrigerated capacity the $7.5 million could create.
That will depend partly on how the eventual subawards are divided. A $200,000 project could fund a substantially different package of equipment from a $10,000 award, while refrigerated vehicles, walk-in systems and smaller refrigeration units have different infrastructure and installation requirements.
USDA has also not identified the prime grant recipients, geographic distribution of funding or number of eventual subawards.
The August funding round follows a cold-chain initiative announced by federal officials in May, when USDA said it intended to establish a competitive grant program to strengthen cold-chain infrastructure for emergency food-assistance operations.
That USDA initiative is separate from a $7.5 million Department of Health and Human Services investment involving HATCH for Hunger announced at the same time.
Applications from organizations seeking to administer USDA’s Cold Chain Grants program are due electronically by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on October 1.
Once those administrators are selected and their subaward competitions begin, the program’s warehouse impact will become clearer: which food-assistance facilities receive equipment, whether funding goes primarily into fixed refrigeration or mobile capacity, and how much additional perishable food those investments allow the network to handle.