EAU CLAIRE — Feed My People Food Bank has announced the end of regular pop-up distributions in Eau Claire, but says food support to partner pantries in the area will strengthen local efforts.
Executive Director Padraig Gallagher said the decision was made earlier than planned, due to a change in access to a neighboring property. This change will only affect distributions held onsite at their Eau Claire facility.
He said efforts to reduce the number of distributions through their Eau Claire facility began in the second half of 2026.
“And we intended to end regular distributions at the end of the year while maintaining the ability to provide emergency or response distributions if there was another food share freeze,” he said. “If there was any sort of community emergency or if getting food out would have been necessary, we were going to.
“The biggest reason for that is we wanted to use our facility to focus on supporting the other pantries and programs that we support here in Eau Claire and throughout our 14 county region.”
Amid the changes, FMP also announced they would be providing $12,000 in additional food support to 20 partner pantries. This food support will focus on key partners in Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls.
“One of the things that we’re able to do is make it so that a dollar of food support is quite a bit of food,” Gallagher said. “So what we’re doing is applying that, using our model for food distribution and providing a lot of value, more than $12,000 worth of food, to these partners.”
As part of their shift towards ending regularly scheduled pop-ups, FMP had announced they would be moving towards an “as-needed” local distribution model in response to crises or weather events.
Gallagher said as they are moving forward, they are considering what they need to work on to create those pop-ups when needed. Expanding accessible hours into the evening is one possibility, although they will need to consider and address visibility and safety.
“We are dedicated to getting that figured out so that we have that capacity returned moving forward. But given the amount of time we had left of the year, we realized we weren’t going to reopen and re-engage for the November-December distributions that we had originally planned,” he said.
With overall operation, Gallagher said they have seen an increase in first-time visits every month except two this year: January, which saw similar distribution numbers compared to last year; and November, which is expected to be lower when compared to the SNAP freeze in 2025.
Gallagher said they are tracking 17% higher than last year on first-time visits to pantries. In 2025, a total of 101,859 individuals sought food from FMP or a partner program at least once.
Furthermore, FMP is tracking an increase of 24% on the pounds of food distributed so far, which was 8.86 million last year.
“In general, the overall need in the community is significantly higher than it was a year ago,” Gallagher said.
“The core model of the food bank is to support the supporters: to make sure that the different partners and agencies throughout the whole 14 counties, and especially here in Eau Claire, are supported and have a lot of capacity. So throughout all of this, we are doubling down that that will be stronger than it has been in the past. That’s not going anywhere.”
Dining and Cooking