By the time Apryl Blood opens the Warner Area Food Pantry to clients at 4 p.m. on Tuesdays and 11 a.m. on Thursdays, nine families are typically waiting by the back door to the building.
The pantry has no indoor holding area, and its narrow aisles can only accommodate three families at once. Clients pass the time in their cars. A new fleet of pagers, devices like the ones in restaurants that tell you when your table is ready, has helped simplify the wait and cut down on needless time spent standing outdoors, weathering bitter cold or blistering heat.
The pantry reliably serves about 100 households every week, but pressures like job losses, rising grocery prices and stricter requirements for SNAP eligibility have recently brought in a growing number of unfamiliar faces.
Blood, the pantry’s volunteer coordinator, estimates that the pantry has historically added four new households to its client population each month. Since October, when the federal government announced it would not fund SNAP benefits for the following month, the number has averaged seven per month.
“People have been more vocal with the same concerns: rent increases, getting to the doctors, people getting laid off. The feedback we get is that everything is going up at once,” Blood said. “What the SNAP problem did was publicize the need that’s always been here. [The general public] saw something they hadn’t seen before.”
It’s been six months since the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, instructed states on Oct. 10 to pause November benefits “until further notice.” A message posted to the department’s website later that month provided little further explanation: “Bottom line, the well has run dry.” By the end of the month, the state stepped in, and then the funding returned.
For local food pantries, peaks and valleys of fluctuating need marked the last three months of 2025, as the state mobilized a contingency plan of drive-through, mobile food pantries and benefits were, ultimately, funded. In Warner, the pantry served a recent high of 421 individuals in October, as fear burgeoned and uncertainty built in the weeks ahead of the expected SNAP disruptions. At the Christ the King Food Pantry in Concord, November saw a marked spike in patron visits larger than any previous leap over the same time period.
Need has, in the first three months of this year, stabilized into a pattern of more consistent growth. Meanwhile, the outpouring of financial support that resulted from food insecurity being thrust into acute public awareness has diminished.
Nationally, donations to hunger relief organizations spiked roughly 587% from Oct. 23 through Oct. 27, according to data analyzed by Charity Navigator, a third-party evaluator that aggregates trustworthy hunger relief causes and tracks donations through its End Hunger Fund.
End-of-year charitable giving typically begins picking up pace at the end of October, and it can be hard to disentangle regular giving from crisis-motivated giving, said Laura Andes, chief program and operating officer at Charity Navigator. But one thing is clear: Adjusting for the Los Angeles wildfires, which motivated giving to Californian food pantries, donations to food pantries were down 29% during the first quarter of 2026 in comparison to the same period last year.
“We are seeing giving being slightly depressed across the board. We are waiting for other sources to validate if that is economic, which is our working theory,” Andes said. “People giving more, even more than ever, is really crisis-driven, and what people are seeing in the news really motivates additional gifts.”
Blood, a retired civil engineer whose children attended preschool in the same room at the Warner Community Center where the food pantry now resides, feels those financial pressures percolating down to the local level.
Children’s multicolored handprints, a remnant of the space’s earlier use, dot the hallway before the storage room where Blood’s inventory of canned goods donated through a Scouting America food drive is dwindling. Donations “came in hard” at the end of last year, but the remarkable generosity that characterized October and November of 2025 has since “tapered off,” she said.
Meanwhile, costs are only increasing, driving need and tightening the food pantry’s budget. Just a few months ago, a pound of hamburger meat cost $3.49; now, Blood regularly sees the same portion priced at $5.49.
“When you buy 30 pounds a week, it adds up fast,” she said. She swatted at the air with a brisk backhand. “And when we finish service hours, our shelves just go ‘woosh.’”
With the pantry’s busiest summer months approaching, Blood can see these challenges accumulating. She could especially benefit from extra volunteers, she said.
“I’m barely keeping up with the increased need.”
New Hampshire’s short-lived contingency plan
In October, the New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services, which administers SNAP at the state level, formulated a stopgap measure to address the immediate fallout from expected disruptions to the food assistance program and approached the New Hampshire Food Bank for help deploying that contingency plan.
The Food Bank already managed a mobile food pantry program, and beginning in November, the state would sponsor a similar program: food box pickups and drive-through mobile food pantries exclusively for SNAP recipients. Residents would need only to present their EBT cards to confirm their eligibility as they drove through the outposts in their communities.
The plan lasted through Nov. 14. The partner agencies that reported back to Elsy Cipriani, executive director of the NH Food Bank, agreed: Many clients said it was their first time at a food pantry, despite all experiencing food insecurity and receiving government assistance. Even within the program, there was stigma.
“These were more, I would say anonymous. People come in the car, they don’t even have to get out of the car. They opened the truck and our volunteers put the food in their trunk,” Cipriani said.
The Food Bank’s two-person SNAP outreach team attends its regular mobile food pantries, communicating updates to the program’s eligibility criteria and upcoming changes.
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Underenrollment continues to be a persistent issue from the advocates’ perspective: About 103,100 Granite Staters are estimated to have experienced food insecurity each year from 2021 to 2023. But during state fiscal year 2024, which began in June of 2023, only 77,027 people were actually enrolled in SNAP, according to a New Hampshire Fiscal Policy Institute analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture data.
Where stigma isn’t an impediment, what Food Bank employees and pantry volunteers have found is that the program’s turbulent end to the year and shifting messaging about the future of eligibility have contributed to uncertainty.
“Putting this program in the center of the controversy, delaying payment, only created more and more hesitation for people to apply. One of the things that we hear from people that may be eligible in New Hampshire is, ‘Why should I apply?’ If they apply, is it likely this program is going to go away for them?’”
Worries about the future of SNAP loomed large
In Concord, the Christ the King Food Pantry was tapped as a local outpost for the state’s contingency plan.
The pantry saw a surge in patron visits in November, when it served 1,193 individuals. Need has intensified in the fall over the last four years, but the spike in patron visits from October to November 2025 was larger than any previous leap during the same period.
Volunteers like Mary Jane Bailey, a parishioner who has donated time to the pantry since its founding more than 50 years ago, attribute the leap to a variety of factors: the pantry’s new accessible facility, the increasing cost of living and, undoubtedly, fears surrounding the status of government food assistance.
“That was just devastating to these people. Can you imagine what it would be like to not get a paycheck?” Bailey said.
Bailey estimates that 85% of the food pantry’s clients have an income of some kind but rely on food assistance to be able to prioritize other living expenses: “I always tell people when they come in, you pay your rent first. Please, please, please, pay your rent first, because at least you have a place to live.”
With new private rooms, the food pantry has grown to encompass other social services, inviting the Merrimack County Navigator Program to hold office hours the first Thursday night of each month to help clients access rent, energy, oil, gas and other forms of assistance. On the second Saturday of each month, the Gospel Justice Center holds clinics at the pantry to provide legal aid to clients.
Still, in a March survey, the food pantry asked its shoppers which services or information they desired from the pantry. A third of respondents noted assistance with SNAP, according to the food pantry.
Bailey remembers the fear that pervaded the last few months of 2025. With talk about changing work requirements swirling, even when benefits came through — despite the federal government’s protestations — “they were so scared that it would happen again.”
