The Farmers to Families Food Box program incentivized under the Trump Administration aimed to help Americans out of work who couldn't afford food during the pandemic. Farmers rescued food that would otherwise have been wasted and boxed them up for the bundle program. Several government-hired private companies to buy unwanted food from restaurants and send it to food banks. However, the program faced food spillage, spoilage, and late or missing deliveries.
Though food bank operators have said that they're thankful for the initiative, and they say that incentive is still needed, most families would have been okay by staying with existing programs because Trump's suffered from so many oversights. “We were in a hurry. People were hungry; there wasn’t food in grocery stores - if there was, they couldn’t afford it,” Greg Ibach, the USDA's former undersecretary for marketing said. “We got a lot of food out the door and in peoples’ hands." Ibach designed the food box program in under a month.
“There was an unequal cost associated with the distribution and filling of these boxes. Some people made a significant percentage from filling the boxes,” The FDA's new Secretary Tom Vilsack said. "We're not going to replace the program." The USDA food boxes cost between $27 and $48 per pox, and "presented new challenges and put additional burdens on food banks," said Emily Broad Leib of Harvard University's Food Law and Policy Clinic. Low-cost boxes contained low-quality food.