Free groceries offered on campus as student food insecurity grows - The Daily Titan

The first permanent food pantry at Cal State Fullerton, which opened in August 2021, continues to serve students experiencing food insecurity.

Since March 2020, food insecurity doubled among Titans from 16% to 31% of students. The food pantry allows students to come in once a week to collect up to 10 free grocery items.

“This food pantry has been kind of a response to that, to try and help people out. And it's been a blessing to see a lot of people come in and get a lot of good food,” said Connor Capo, a food pantry employee.

The first week that the pantry was open, it received visits from 98 students. Since August, it has been visited over 3,000 times.

Cristina Truong, the assistant director of Titan Student Union Services and Food Pantry, and Kristen Johansson, the pantry graduate assistant, said about 920 CSUF students regularly visit the pantry.

“Each student is going about three times a semester, but we're anticipating more students coming in spring time just because there's more students enrolled or not enrolled, but coming back in person for this spring semester,” Truong said.

Capo said about half of visits to the pantry this semester have been from new appointments.

The food pantry receives supplies and resources from donations, and is partnered with the Second Harvest Food Bank, which delivers to the food pantry weekly based on the supplies that are available to donate. The pantry requests for more supplies is based on the amount of students that come through for the week.

“We get a large selection of foods. So we get produce, fruits and veggies, shelf-stable things like rice, pasta, oatmeal, and then refrigerated things — some milk, eggs, various frozen food items that are easy for students to take. They've been a wonderful partner,” Johansson said.

Along with the donations by the Second Harvest Food Bank, Johansson said the pantry just recently partnered with the Second Harvest Food Bank grocery rescue program, which will allow them to reach out to local Ralphs and Sprouts to receive donations from any of their order excess that they have.

“We get a ton of array of food, we get produce and milk, and really cool items that you would see on the shelves,” Johansson said.

Johansson said the food pantry also recently partnered with the Arboretum. If there are any foods that can’t be distributed to students but can still be used for compost, the food pantry donates it to the Arboretum. In return, the Arboretum will donate some of the fresh produce they harvest to the pantry.

“It's a local program we're working on. And we'll start doing that really, really soon within the next week or two. So that's really cool to also keep fresher produce on the shelves for longer for our students,” Johansson said.

The food pantry is always accepting donations. According to the ASI webpage, the food pantry has a wishlist of items that they would like to have donated for students.

Since the pantry limits the amount of items a student can get per week, they provide students with different resources and information on other food banks in Orange County and Los Angeles County under their additional resources section on their webpage.

“It's difficult to get a whole week's three-meals-a-day worth of food from that one trip. And so supplementing that with other resources is something we try to offer on our website,” Johansson said.

They have also partnered with Tuffy’s Basic Needs, a program which exists to help students through financial hardship, to help provide other resources for students.

“I think definitely we've seen in the past couple of weeks, the increase of more students coming through the pantry. So we can tell that more students are finding out about our services. So that's great. We love to see the students there,” Truong said.

The ASI Food Pantry is completely free for any CSUF student to use. To set up an appointment, students can visit the PantrySoft website. Students are welcome to come back once a week for food supplies.

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