In our spotlight on business report tonight, Passaic County's largest food bank says it's in crisis.

CUMAC just received $25,000 in the state budget, but it's still facing a shortfall as the demand for its services reaches record highs.

And as Ted Goldberg reports, with tariffs in flux, grocery prices increasing, staff benefits shrinking, food costs remain a major stressor for more than half of Americans, and CUMAC leaders are scrambling to figure out how to survive.

(alarm beeping) The food pantry CUMAC has never been busier.

It's something that keeps us up at night, but our organization, we've been here for 40 years, we're ready to serve, and we will meet the moment like we always have.

Jessica Padilla-Gonzalez and her coworkers in Patterson handle around 200 appointments per day for people to come in and grab some food.

About 60% of them are coming one to five times per year.

About 40% are coming six to 12 times per year.

So it makes a really interesting pattern for us.

We're not only providing foods that we're rescuing or that we're getting donated, we actually go out and purchase foods because we wanna make sure that all of our families have access to a complete meal.

So we're buying meats, we're buying pastas, we're buying rice, we're buying canned goods for them to be able to prepare a complete meal.

Most of the food they hand out is donated or gleaned from stores that have excess.

Just don't call it free.

With the donations, there is a whole crew of drivers that go out and drive, so it's not free.

We have personnel, we have trucks.

Every dollar counts.

CUMAC is staring down a $250,000 deficit for the next fiscal year, even with $250,000 coming from state funds.

We're happy that we actually made it, we're honored that we were in the budget, but the amount that we received versus the need that we're seeing, that's gonna be a big obstacle for us.

Gonzalez and her coworkers are concerned about tariffs and the rising costs of groceries.

According to the Consumer Price Index, grocery costs dipped 0.1% last month, but are 2% higher than a year ago.

It's making it more expensive for our consumers who are already probably living on limited budgets, right?

A lot of them are working, they're employed, they're on fixed incomes, but then it's also for us when we start doing our rescue, right?

So if stores start buying less because of the tariffs, we may have less food to rescue.

If we have less that we're able to glean because stores are buying less because of tariffs or inflation or whatever may occur, we're gonna have less to bring into our space, we're going to have less to therefore provide to the community.

Tom Prusa is a professor of economics at Rutgers.

He's concerned that rising food costs could lead to shortages at local food banks.

And it's been a chronic problem for quite a while now, and it would be a policy issue that seriously should be addressed for a variety of reasons.

One being the tariffs.

And again, the tariffs have a nuanced effect because how they impact different food products is gonna vary across, and have a different effect on corn than it will on products that are handpicked, for instance.

Prusa also thinks that reductions in federal benefits could drive more people to those very food banks that could have a lower supply.

If they've cut other parts of the social safety net, including SNAP payments, in effect it's gonna create more demand.

So without more resources, we're gonna have even greater relative shortages in the food banks because there's gonna be more and more people needing to access their food via food banks.

Wallart at CUMEX says ending hunger has nothing to do with giving people food, which is why they also provide job training and mental health counseling on site.

CUMEX is on pace to serve 80,000 people this year, all navigating an uncertain future ahead.

In Patterson, I'm Ted Goldberg, NJ Spotlight News.

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