The number of families dependent on the food bank for food is increasing again. This is evident from the organization’s annual report. For a few years, fewer and fewer people turned to food aid.

Food banks provide free food to people in poverty. A lot of food comes from the supermarkets. The food banks are located throughout the country, at 181 different locations. All these locations together helped more than 155,000 people last year, about 11,000 more than a year earlier.

It is still a lot lower than in 2023 and 2022. In the last year of the corona pandemic, almost 200,000 people accepted help from the food bank.

Poverty also increased again last year in the Netherlands, after five years of decline. A similar kink can be seen in the number of working poor. “The increase in poverty in a prosperous country like the Netherlands is worrying,” writes Henk Staghouwer, chairman of Food Banks Netherlands, in the annual report. “Every day we hear stories of people who no longer have money to buy food, who send their children to school on an empty stomach and are often deeply ashamed of their situation.”

The increase may also be due to the food banks themselves. Last year, the organization went extra hard to find people who had so far remained under the radar, but who are eligible for help.

Working poor, self-employed people and the elderly with only an AOW benefit are increasingly dependent on the food bank. “We also saw this target group coming to us as customers in 2024,” says Staghouwer. According to him, retrenchment measures from the government in 2025 will reinforce this. “Their costs have risen. As a result, we see an increase in self-employed people and we also see that AOW people without a supplementary pension stay with our customers longer or no longer leave at all.”

The food banks expect the number of customers to increase in the coming years, while supermarkets are increasingly combating food waste. In order to be able to distribute enough food, the food banks try to distribute the food better between the locations.

In addition, the organization has started a program to obtain food supplies from customs. The food is there because there is something wrong with the formalities, but the quality of the food is fine.