Food banks and pantries have been experiencing historic demand since SNAP benefits halted on Nov. 1 for many Americans due to the federal government shutdown.
That halt affected nearly 42 million Americans, many of whom are older or low-income, and use benefits to help pay for groceries and other essentials.
President Donald Trump late Wednesday night signed a funding bill to end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt earlier said that full SNAP benefits will be paid out once the shutdown was resolved.
However, food assistance workers said the restoration of food assistance can’t come soon enough as they struggle to fill in the gap left behind by SNAP.
Cyndi Kirkhart, executive director at Facing Hunger Food Bank, said she’s been working at the food bank for 11 years and has never seen the surge in people she is seeing now, and that it is higher than what she saw during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Facing Hunger Food Bank — which serves 17 counties in West Virginia, Ohio and eastern Kentucky — said some locations in the southern part of West Virginia have seen a 1,800% increase in the number of families visiting.
Carrie Shawl, center, and Natalie Cooper, left, show their SNAP documents at a food distribution site in Frazer, Mont., on Nov. 10, 2025.
Mike Clark/AP
“Typically, we do mobile pantry distribution, which are cars [lining] up [and] we load their car up with food,” she told ABC News. “At the most, we’ll see 250 families. The past week, solidly, we have seen 900 families at each distribution, at each site.”
Kirkhart said their mobile pantries have seen such demand that instead of sending large box trucks to load up supplies at the food bank, she has had to send tractor-trailers. She added that she only has two tractor-trailers, which puts a lot of pressure on drivers to load up and visit multiple distribution sites.
Kirkhart said her organization encourages individuals to go to the food pantries for food rather than the bank, but they will still serve people who visit the bank.
“We’ll still have maybe, over the course of a month, 50 people that will show up directly at the food bank for an emergency food box,” she said. “And these past two weeks at least, we have had 60 a day. … It’s non-stop.”
In Washington state, food banks are also seeing an exponential increase in visitors. Jordan Beaudry, development and communications manager at North Help Line — which provides emergency services including food aid — said there has been a surge at the two food banks the organization serves that has been years in the making.
Starting in 2022, “we saw our numbers practically double overnight, and it’s just been a steady increase since then,” he told ABC News. “We’re serving twice as many folks as we did three years ago, and that is sort of setting the stage going into this latest round of SNAP Â cuts and the government shutdown. … We’ve seen just a massive increase in the amount of folks accessing services, particularly since the pause on SNAP benefits.”
The most recent demand began in October, when it was first announced that SNAP benefits may be halted in November, Beaudry said.
From July through September, the banks saw an average of 1,086 visitors per week for the first two weeks of the month, according to data provided by Beaudry. In October, the average for the first two weeks was 1,136 per week. Last week, the banks saw 1,329 visits.
At one of the food banks, Beaudry said the last Thursday in October was the highest number of people the organization has ever seen on a Thursday, with about a 14% increase in households visiting to receive food.
Similarly, Kristen Wild, president and CEO of hunger relief organization Operation Food Search, which serves 25 counties in Missouri and Illinois, said the pantries, shelters and community sites where the organization’s supplies are distributed are seeing increases in people visiting between 30% and 50%.
She described a distribution event last week during which Operation Food Search had prepared 700 meals to issue starting at 10 a.m. CT. An hour before the event, the line of cars was 500 long and more than 200 families had to be turned away.
People wait in line at a Central Texas Food Bank distribution at Nelson Field on Nov. 4, 2025, in Austin, Texas.
Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images
“We’ve had agencies report to us that they have had to shut down earlier than their typical operating hours because they have run out of food,” she told ABC News. “We’re seeing agencies are being approached by people looking for food who’ve never needed to use a pantry in the past because the SNAP benefits were sufficient enough for them to get the food resources that they needed.”
The organization also runs a metro market program, which is like a mobile grocery store, that has seen a surge in customers.
The program charges for food at or below cost but has recently started issuing $15 vouchers to customers due to the increase in demand, Wild said. Workers have also had to replenish shelves multiple times throughout a two-hour metro market stop due to the increase in traffic.
Wild added that 90% of food assistance comes from federal programs like SNAP and about 10% comes from food banks and food pantries. The halt in SNAP benefits has forced food banks to go into “overdrive” to make up as much of the gap as possible.
“We’ve had terrific community support, both in terms of more food donations, more financial donations, so we can purchase more food, but we can’t make up for the full SNAP gap,” she said.
