To Buy Wholesale Milk For its Food Boxes, USDA is Paying Well Above Retail Prices

New analysis finds USDA’s food aid program is buying milk at overblown prices⁠—sometimes more than twice what you’d pay in the supermarket.

Like more than 500 other would-be federal contractors, Sherrie Tussler applied to be a part of the Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Farmers to Families Food Box program on behalf of her food bank, Hunger Task Force. She asked for $37 million to move fruit, vegetables, dairy, and meat to pantries across the state of Wisconsin. “It was a pretty bold move on our part,” she says. 

As Tussler worked her way through the proposal, she tried to set a price point for each gallon of milk that would both compensate dairies fairly and keep costs low. She settled on a range of $2.00 to $2.38 per gallon. Roughly a dollar would make its way back to the farmer, and the rest would go to packaging and transportation. 

But Hunger Task Force was not awarded a food box contract. Instead, the opportunity went to a distributor in Kenosha and a school food provider in Chicago. Tussler was told her application failed because of a technicality. Tussler says the inexperienced contractors then struggled with the logistics, packaging produce in flimsy boxes that fell apart and sending five-pound bags of cooked chicken wings to senior citizens. 

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