Food as Medicine: What It Is, and Why Food Banks Are Leading the Way
Walk into a food pantry and you'll find neighbors picking up groceries to get through the week. Walk into a clinic and you'll find patients managing diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease. For most of the history of both institutions, those two worlds didn't overlap much.
Food as Medicine is changing that.
I've spent five years working at the intersection of food banking and health, and I still find myself learning something new every day. Food as Medicine is gaining traction in the food banking world, and it’s worth understanding if you want to see lasting health outcomes for the neighbors you serve.
What Food as Medicine Means
Food As Medicine (FAM) programs aim to provide healthy food to help treat, manage, and prevent diet-related conditions such as diabetes and hypertension. At its core, Food as Medicine is the recognition that many of the neighbors food banks serve aren't just food insecure, they're nutrition insecure, and many are living with diet-related chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension. The premise is straightforward: If food affects health, then providing the right food to someone who needs it is a form of treatment, management, and prevention.
Food banks have been quietly working in this space for over a decade. A lot of the early programming centered on diabetes, which makes sense — the connection between diet and A1C levels is well documented, and improvements are measurable over time. But the scope has grown considerably since then, and today Food as Medicine covers a broad spectrum of programs and approaches, like:
Medically tailored groceries or meals for diet-related chronic health conditions
Produce prescriptions
Population health food policies and programs
Nutrition counseling and education
Food insecurity screening at local health clinics with patients provided a referral to a healthy food pantry
Healthy food pantry models
Food pantries co-located at health clinics
One important thing to understand: Food as Medicine is almost always done in partnership with a healthcare provider. Federally qualified health centers (FQHCs), free clinics, and hospital systems are the most common partners. These organizations screen their patients for food insecurity and, when there's a need, provide a referral — sometimes even a formal prescription — to receive food from a local pantry. The healthcare side drives a lot of the demand for these programs, because clinicians see firsthand how a patient's diet affects their outcomes.
The Benefits of Food as Medicine
For neighbors, the benefits are meaningful and long-lasting. Access to food that's actually tailored to their health needs brings them dignity along with the nutrition they need. Being seen as a whole person with a specific need, and having that need met with intention, is different from receiving whatever happens to be available.
And the proof is in the numbers. National implementation of produce prescription programs for patients with both diabetes and food insecurity could bring about the following results:
292,000 fewer cardiovascular events
260,000 quality-adjusted life years (this is a measurement of how a treatment can lengthen or improve patients’ lives)
$39.6 billion in healthcare savings
$4.8 billion in productivity savings
Other studies showed a variety of positive outcomes, like:
Lower A1C: Diabetic patients who participated in a 13-week produce prescription program saw significantly lower A1C levels, from 9.54% to 8.83%.
Increased fruit and vegetable intake among children: In a pediatric produce prescription program, the percentage of children meeting federal dietary guidelines increased from 93% to 100% for fruits and from 64% to 70% for vegetables.
Less emergency room visits: Participants in a clinic-based “Food Farmacy” program that included free produce vouchers saw acute care utilization decrease by 77%.
Improved food security: In a pediatric farmers' market produce prescription program, 72% of households increased their food security score.
For food banks, Food as Medicine opens up new dimensions of impact and new funding streams from Medicaid, insurers, and healthcare partners. It elevates the food bank as a healthcare-adjacent community partner rather than a traditional charity. FAM generates measurable outcomes data that strengthens grant applications and communications. And it offers a way to differentiate — to make the case that a food bank is doing something more than moving pounds, that it's actively contributing to community health.
Why Many Food Banks Haven't Jumped In Yet
If Food as Medicine has been around for a decade and the case for it is strong, why aren't more food banks doing it? The honest answer is that the barriers are real.
Funding is the most immediate concern. Healthier food and medically tailored groceries cost more than processed foods. The cost can be addressed through grants, community funding, healthcare partnerships, and Medicaid reimbursements, but the question of how to sustain that cost still stops a lot of organizations before they start.
The infrastructure requirements can feel daunting, too. Some Food as Medicine programs operate within reimbursement models that require data sharing agreements with healthcare partners and systems for tracking outcomes. Concerns about HIPAA compliance, reporting health outcomes, and needing staff to manage the program — including, often, a registered dietitian — add up quickly.
I also often hear: “We're about hunger relief. We’re not a healthcare organization.” That's a fair thing to wrestle with. Food as Medicine can feel like mission creep if there isn't a shared understanding of why it belongs within the food bank's work.
But the food we distribute matters. It's always mattered. Food banks have been pushing toward healthier sourcing for years precisely because there's a recognition that access to nutritious food is inseparable from the mission of ending hunger. Food as Medicine is an extension of that thinking.
Who to Partner With, and How to Start
For food banks that want to explore Food as Medicine, start with intentionally investigating a local healthcare partnership. You may already have one. If not, the most natural starting points are:
Federally qualified health centers: FQHCs serve similar populations to food banks and they’re often eager partners in this space
Free clinics: They serve uninsured populations who are vulnerable to food insecurity
Hospital health systems: They conduct community health needs assessments, meaning they already have data on diet-related conditions in your service area, and they often have grant funding and strategies aimed at improving food access
The most important thing to remember when approaching a healthcare partner: Come as a thought partner, not just as an organization looking for funding. Ask what they're trying to accomplish and share what you're thinking. Explore what a collaboration could look like. Healthcare partners respond well to that posture, and it builds the kind of trust that a long-term partnership requires.
You’ll also want to partner with the neighbors you serve. Conduct focus groups or surveys before building out Food as Medicine programming, asking neighbors what they want and how they want to access it. For example, after a doctor's appointment, would you want to pick up food on-site at the clinic, or would you rather go to a pantry near home? Those preferences shape what a program should look like, and skipping that step is how well-intentioned programs end up underused.
Explore Food as Medicine in Your Service Area
Food as Medicine in the food banking world is still, as one food bank leader put it to me recently, a bit like the Wild West. Every food bank is negotiating its own approach, often one healthcare partner at a time.
That clarity is coming. In the meantime, food banks that want to explore this space don't have to figure it out alone.
If your food bank is curious about Food as Medicine and wondering where to start, we'd love to have a conversation. SWIM works with food banks at every stage of this process — from assessing your readiness and mapping healthcare partners to developing an evaluation framework and building the partnerships that make this work sustainable. If you’re ready to get started, we’re ready to make it easier.
Amy Haynes is a Facilitator and Consultant at See What I Mean (SWIM). Her past consulting clients include CVS Health, Feeding America National Organization, Feeding America of Riverside | San Bernardino, Vermont Food Bank, county level food policy councils, and dozens of grassroots community organizations. Amy’s ongoing community work has coordinated partnerships between grassroots and institutional leaders to address many of the drivers of health, like social support and access to healthy food choices through Food as Medicine programming.