One in five Minnesota households struggle to afford food.

We did make the switch in the beginning of COVID to be open to anyone and as often as needed. And that's a been a growing trend within our industry.

I love that you've changed that focus. And even though people have to come more, they're getting healthier food which is helping in the long run with everything, keeping costs down for everybody.

For every nine meals that SNAP provides a food the food shelf system only supports one.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate the change in the model to opening it up to people when they actually need it and how often they need it. The number of times that myself and my colleagues have had to try to figure out where people can go for their next free food because they have they're out of money and they've already used this one and they've already used that one. So like where else can they go and they don't have money for transportation? It's just it just compounds problems.

I'm just looking at this saying you've changed your your model and you've lowered barriers to to access and your in usage went up. Well, from an economic standpoint, of course it did. Um and is there a is there a is it does it chase itself? I just wonder if we're not chasing ourselves and if we're just, you know, well, yeah, we made it easier for people to get food and there's no economic transaction in it. So, we shouldn't be surprised that more people took advantage of it.

Especially appreciate your food recovery efforts, food waste is such a significant impact from a sustainability lens and greenhouse gas emissions. So being able to reuse that and leaning into that, I think is great because there's a need and it's being met.