A FoodBank Manager Alternative: PantryPOS vs FoodBank Manager
Short answer: FoodBank Manager and PantryPOS are both cloud food pantry systems with a 30-day free trial and no setup fee. FoodBank Manager starts lower, at $34.95 a month, but inventory/POS and its online-ordering portal are $25 add-ons per location. PantryPOS is $39 a month for the first location with inventory, checkout, the client portal and food-safety tools included. With both add-ons at one location FoodBank Manager is $84.95 a month, against $39 for PantryPOS.
What FoodBank Manager offers
FoodBank Manager, made by Sox Box Software (a family company in Show Low, Arizona, that released it in 2011), is a cloud system for food banks and pantries covering guest registration, barcode check-in, distribution tracking, volunteer time tracking, a donation tool, electronic signatures and USDA support for TEFAP, CSFP and other programs, including eligibility and visit-frequency rules. Its published price is $34.95 a month, which includes one location and unlimited logins, guests, volunteers, visits, donors and donations, plus training and support. There is no setup fee, no contract and a 30-day free trial with no card. Three things are add-ons, each $25 a month per location: an additional location, Inventory with point of sale, and the Guest Portal for online reservations and ordering. Its point of sale supports client-choice and shop-style pantries and enforces distribution limits, and online orders are tied to available inventory. It can run as a private database for one pantry, a shared database for a multi-site organization, or linked “associations” of pantries that share visit rules to prevent double-dipping. It can be paid monthly, every six months or yearly, and its team offers to help import existing data.
Where PantryPOS is different
What the base price includes. PantryPOS is $39 a month for the first location, $29 for each added location up to ten, and less beyond that. That price includes unlimited staff accounts, clients and volunteers, a client portal with pre-orders and a waitlist, client-choice checkout, FIFO inventory with expiration warnings, lot and barcode recall tracing, cold-chain temperature logs, donation tax-receipt letters, volunteer scheduling, TEFAP/USDA reporting with the records a monitor asks for (who picked up, every eligibility declaration, a signed distribution log, TEFAP stock reconciled by lot), each State’s TEFAP rules on screen, a civil-rights complaint and training log, and an offline mode. Nothing is sold as a per-location add-on.
The food-safety side. PantryPOS tracks lots and barcodes so a supplier recall produces a list of the households that may have received it (what to do in a recall), logs fridge and freezer temperatures (temperature logs), warns before stock expires and records waste with a reason. FoodBank Manager's published plan and add-ons do not list recall tracing or cold-chain logging — check their current materials, but that is where the two point in different directions.
Offline and languages. PantryPOS keeps checking people out when the connection drops and syncs later, and every staff screen works in English, Spanish and French.
Price compared, from each vendor's published pricing
- 1 location, intake and reporting only — FoodBank Manager $34.95/month; PantryPOS $39/month.
- 1 location with inventory/POS and online ordering — FoodBank Manager $84.95/month ($34.95 + $25 + $25); PantryPOS $39/month.
- 3 locations, all with inventory and online ordering — FoodBank Manager $234.95/month (its own pricing example); PantryPOS $97/month.
- Trial and setup — both: 30 days free, no card, no setup fee.
- Users — both: unlimited logins and volunteers.
When FoodBank Manager is the better choice
If your pantry needs registration, check-in, volunteer hours and USDA reports at one site, and you do not track shelf inventory or take online orders, FoodBank Manager's base plan is the cheaper of the two by about four dollars a month, with training and support included. If you only need inventory and point of sale at one site (no guest portal), it is $59.95 a month, and if neighbouring pantries already use FoodBank Manager, its association feature lets you share visit rules with them. If you need the food-safety records (lot recall tracing, temperature logs), an offline mode, or the guest portal and inventory at several sites, compare the totals above.