The Oregon Food Bank delivers food to a statewide network of over 1,200 partner agencies across Oregon and Southwest Washington, with an office and warehouse located at 1870 N.W. 173rd Ave. in Beaverton. (Courtesy: Oregon Food Bank)

With the Trump administration’s plans to halt millions of dollars in food deliveries, the Oregon Food Bank is facing disruptions in service that will impact its Beaverton location.

The Oregon Food Bank delivers food to a statewide network of over 1,200 partner agencies across Oregon and Southwest Washington, with an office and warehouse located at 1870 N.W. 173rd Ave. in Beaverton.

Food insecurity has been on the rise in Washington County and across the state in recent years, Matt Newell-Ching, senior manager of public policy for the Oregon Food Bank. And in a time when the food bank is serving a growing number of people in need, it will have to find new ways to fill in gaps left by canceled federal support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

High cost of food increases food insecurity

Newell-Ching said that while hunger rates stabilized and lowered as Oregonians received COVID-19 relief funds from the federal government, food insecurity began to rise again in late 2022 and 2023.

The high cost of food has driven food insecurity, especially as people juggle other expenses, such as medical debt, rent and student debt.

“This past year, we saw a pretty significant increase in the number of visits (to food pantries) across our network,” Newell-Ching said. “We essentially saw a 31% increase, over the course of the year. It’s a pretty big jolt to our system.”

The Oregon Food Bank helped facilitate 2.5 million visits to its food assistance sites in 2024.

“We also know that this coincides with the expiration of a lot of the pandemic-era assistance,” Newell-Ching added.

In Washington County, the need was even greater.

“For Washington County, we actually saw a slightly higher magnitude of increase,” Newell-Ching said. “Whereas the prior year, 2023, there were about 193,000 visits to partner agencies in Washington County, in 2024, there were 264,000, so that’s a 37% increase.”

‘It’s happening everywhere’

Food insecurity is a problem everywhere, Newell-Ching said.

“It’s happening in urban areas, it’s happening in rural areas, it’s happening everywhere,” he said. “There are different regional challenges, but fundamentally, we’re all facing pretty similar challenges.”

Newell-Ching said data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture confirms the problem.

“They probably have what we would consider the gold standard of research of food insecurity and hunger in the nation,” he said. “They basically said that hunger and food insecurity are one-third higher today than they were prior to the pandemic.”

Cuts to support

Despite rising hunger rates, the Oregon Food Bank is facing drastic cuts in federal help. USDA recently announced that it will cancel $500 million in shipments to food banks across the country, cutting off a critical supply chain for food banks and schools nationwide.

“The Oregon Food Bank does receive food and some administrative support from the U.S. Department of Agriculture,” Newell-Ching said. “We’re under contract to provide those services. Within the set of food that we receive from the USDA, a pretty solid chunk of that was essentially eliminated.”

He added, “There has been no memo saying ‘here’s the plan’ or ‘this doesn’t exist anymore.’”

In January, the Oregon Food Bank ordered 30 truckloads of food that were scheduled to arrive in food bank warehouses starting in April.

“We just noticed that those deliveries had been cancelled,” Newell-Ching said. “We were projecting that about 60 more truckloads were going to come later on this year.”

He said 30 truckloads of food equates to 1.4 million pounds of food.

“To put that into perspective, that’s about 18% of the food that we distributed last year,” he said.