PORT ANGELES — The Port Angeles Food Bank is adding chili stuffed potatoes, Northwest burrito bowls and weeknight Tuscan ribolitta to its fundraising menu of ways the community can help support mobilizing resources to fight food insecurity.
The entrees are among the 11 Comfort Café Home Style Meals prepared in the food bank’s commercial kitchen that are now available for purchase. It’s the food bank’s first earned-revenue venture, part of an effort to diversify its funding beyond donations and grants.
Port Angeles Food Bank Executive Director Emily Dexter called Comfort Café meals a “buy one, donate one” program. For every $12 meal that is purchased, one will be donated to the food bank’s market at 632 N. Oakridge Drive or its mobile market that distributes groceries at scheduled times throughout Port Angeles.
It is important people know that the undertaking does not take away from the food bank’s core mission of providing food assistance, Dexter said.
“All of the meals are made with fresh ingredients purchased from vendors,” Dexter said. “None of it comes from any donor streams.”
Kayla Fairchild, the food bank’s culinary manager, and volunteers prepare, package and freeze 100 each of the single-serving Comfort Café meals every week.
Fairchild and Neil Dexter, who is now the nonprofit’s major gifts specialist, put a great deal of work into tweaking flavors to keep the meals tasty and healthy.
“They have so many other herbs and spices in them that you don’t really need the salt,” Fairchild said.
All of the Comfort Café meals are high in protein and complex carbohydrates, low in sodium and contain no sugar. Only one meal contains gluten and just two contain meat.
For example, a 2-cup serving of sweet potato chicken chili — Fairchild and Emily Dexter’s favorite — has 334 calories, 17 grams of protein, 6 grams of fat and just 29 milligrams of sodium. (For perspective, consider 1 teaspoon of table salt has about 2,300 mg of sodium).
The plan is to eventually offer a rotating selection of Comfort Café offerings. In addition to the meals listed above, the line includes chickpea cacciatore, creamy lentil soup, fiesta enchilada bowl, garden bolognese pasta, Mexican unstuffed peppers, red beans and rice, and red lentil and tomato bisque. Nutrition information is available at www.comfortcafemeals.org and via QR code on the packaging.
Comfort Café meals were borne out of a collaboration with the Sequim Food Bank, which wanted to create a pilot program called Welcome Home Food that delivered healthy prepared food to people after they have been discharged from a hospital or medical facility.
Sequim Food Bank received a grant from Olympic Area on Aging to develop its program, while the Port Angeles Food Bank received one to develop Comfort Café.
The Sequim Food Bank hired Monica Dixon, a registered dietician nutritionist, to create 20 health recipes for Welcome Home Food meals. Dixon then worked with the Port Angeles Food Bank’s culinary team to fine-tune them and scale them up for production.
Sequim’s grant does not pay for the meals themselves. That funding came from a state Department of Agriculture grant.
The referral-based Welcome Home Food, which has no income restrictions, has been incredibly successful, Executive Director Andra Smith said, and reflected a growing and more complex need for food support over the past five years that was reflected across the Olympic Peninsula.
“The first four months of this year, we saw a higher demand over the first four months of 2024, and that was 20 percent higher than in 2023,” she said. “It used to be in that food banks were a stop-gap. Now they are a regular source of food for people.”
Permitting issues delayed the Comfort Café’s launch because Port Angeles was required to obtain a catering permit to be able to legally sell prepared food to the public.
Right now, Comfort Café meals are only available for purchase online and must be picked up at the food bank. Orders made by Friday will be available the following Tuesday, Fitzgerald said.
Dexter said the food bank is currently seeking ways to expand the Comfort Café beyond Port Angeles.
“We’re looking for new grant funding that will allow us to give more of them away,” she said.
Comfort Café Home Style Meals
Each single-serving meal costs $12; for each meal purchased, one will be donated to the food bank. To order, go to www.comfortcafemeals.org.
Meals can be picked up at the Port Angeles Food Bank, 632 N. Oakridge Drive.
To contact the Port Angeles Food Bank, call 360-452-8568.
Welcome Home Food program
Six meals delivered to your home once a week for the first four weeks after being discharged from a hospital.
Although not income-based, clients must have a referral from a provider, hospital or other health facility.
For more information, go to www.sequimfoodbank.org/welcome-home-food.
To enroll, call the Sequim Food Bank at 360-565-5728 or email WHF@sequimfoodbank.org.
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Reporter Paula Hunt can be reached by email at paula.hunt@peninsuladailynews.com.
Keith Thorpe/Peninsula Daily News Port Angeles Food Bank volunteer Fran Howell, left, talks on Friday with culinary manager Kayla Fairchild about prepared Comfort Cafe meals for distribution to food bank users.
