Hormel Foods, a 132-year-old Fortune 500 company, realized that the share of hungry people in its home county hadn’t budged in a decade despite community food programs. So it decided to do something.
The largest employer in Austin, Minnesota, convened local partners in May 2022 to discuss hunger in Mower County. More than 40 leaders from 20-plus nonprofits, academia, private enterprises and government attended the Toward Food Security 2025: A Case for Change Summit.
Molly Lanke, executive director of the United Way of Mower County, became the project’s lead and initiated coalition-building for what became the Hometown Food Security Project (HFSP).
“The idea wasn’t new, but our approach was," said Tammy Snee, wife of Hormel CEO Jim Snee and a community advocate for HFSP. "It is unique for a big corporation to take a lead, focus its energy on food security, and encourage its employees to volunteer their time to talk about it. Nonprofits and big companies need to work together. Only then can we change the world,” said Snee, a nurse who has worked at the Mayo Clinic.
Last year, Hormel also hired Gema Alvarado-Guerrero as its first-ever workforce wellness facilitator. She also serves as a co-lead of the HFSP. Half of her efforts are devoted to the project and half as an embedded social worker at Hormel’s flagship plant in Austin, where 1,800 employees speak 13 languages and dialects.
By August 2022, HFSP’s core team included the Salvation Army, public schools, a community college, the Mayo Clinic Health System, local government agencies and Hormel. The coalition collaborates with experts from the Baylor University Collaborative on Hunger and Poverty.
Jeremy Everett, executive director of the Baylor program, offered Baylor's Hunger Free Community Toolkit to HFSP.
“Fortunately, our farmers, ranchers, and food companies like Hormel produce enough food to ensure that all people living in the United States should have enough food to live an active, healthy lifestyle. Unfortunately, millions of Americans are food insecure because of economic or geographical barriers to the bounty produced by our agriculture sector,” Everett said.
HFSP’s goal is to ensure that all people in Mower County have access to the food they need regardless of income, racial or ethnic barriers or geographical location. It employs up-to-date research and data, Everett said, adding, “They are an absolute inspiration to all of us,” he said of HFSP.
At an average cost of $3.02 per meal, Feeding America calculates that $1.6 million per year would be needed to purchase just enough to meet the nutrition needs of the county’s food insecure.
Lanke said the community has donated more than $100,000 to date. "This collective support enables us to focus on what’s most important — expanding the reach and impact of our coalition, sharing our blueprint with other communities nationwide, and ultimately achieving food security for our community and many others,” she said.
“Tonight, in our community, homebound elderly persons will scour their cupboards, hoping to find a can of food. Parents will struggle to understand the resources available to help them feed their families. Children will be unable to sleep because of pain in their bellies,” states the Hunger and Food Insecurity Community Assessment Report for Mower County produced by the coalition.
According to Feeding America, 8.4% of the Mower County’s population was food insecure in 2020. While that was below the U.S. average of 11.8%, it was higher than Minnesota’s 6% average. In 2021, one in seven kids, or 5.2%, of the youth population in Mower Country was considered food insecure, slightly higher than the national average.
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Alvarado-Guerrero said the county has immigrants from many countries and the project focuses on new waves of immigrants and their unique needs. In 2000, 94.7 % of the county was White, but the 2020 Census found only 75.2% of county residents identified as White, with 12.8% Hispanic or Latino, 5.8% Asian, and 4.2% Black or African-American.
“Immigrant households on average experience food insecurity at a rate of 1.53% higher than non-immigrant households. For undocumented immigrants, the chance of facing food insecurity is even greater,” the report notes. “Based on a 2016 study, undocumented immigrants are almost twice as likely to experience food insecurity as the rest of the population.”
By 2021, 10.9% of the county’s population was born in another country and many of them worked in the meatpacking industry. An estimated 1,300 to 2,600 food insecure immigrants live in the county, and about one in seven will not avail themselves of the aid they qualify for out of fear it will affect their immigration status, the community assessment says.
One HFSP effort is a SNAP Advocacy Action Team, which seeks out those who might not know they qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, those who need help to enroll, and those who need help to stay enrolled.
A Mobile Food Action Team found that the only store near a mobile home park charged higher prices than more distant stores. The team now seeks to give residents access to more affordable food.
“We have been using the Salvation Army’s truck for our mobile markets, but the Salvation Army is bound by traditional work hours of 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., so we are also looking at trunk events,” where volunteers disseminate a food item from their vehicle’s trunk outside of traditional work hours, Alvarado-Guerrero said,
HFSP has also developed an app that residents can use to find the nearest food pantries, free meals, EBT (electronic benefit transfer) forms, help with translation, and other things they need.
For the first time, five students from Austin High School will compete in the annual World Food Prize Global Challenge through World Food Prize Youth Institutes. The juniors and seniors enrolled in Advanced Placement Human Geography and developed long-term solutions to end food insecurity. Hormel employees Sneha Jogi and Danny Holton are class mentors.
Hormel’s communications team also provided time and resources to the coalition. For instance, Hormel partnered with the high school for a fundraiser at the Spam Museum to help educate the public about food insecurity. Hormel employees provided publicity and event support. One resulting exhibit showed photographs of the insides of Mower County residents’ refrigerators, all anonymous, from both food secure and food insecure households.
“We’ve had a great response from the community,” Snee said. “People are very interested in what we are doing. We have an office in downtown Austin, a collaborative space with groups that work with the schools, first through 12th grade students who might need a bit of coaching. Having a window with a sign in it on Main Street has made it something that people talk about in town. It’s made it a safe conversation. We are giving people resources and a hand up.”
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