How to Report MealConnect Grocery Rescue Receipts (and Upload a Week at Once)
MealConnect is Feeding America’s food-rescue app. A grocery store posts food it cannot sell, a partner agency near it accepts and picks it up, and the agency then reports what it collected. That last step is the one that eats volunteer time: every pickup is a receipt, and a pantry with three or four stores on its schedule can have a dozen or more to enter every week. This guide explains how receipts work, the Bulk Upload feature that takes a whole batch at once, and the other records food rescue asks you to keep.
What a receipt is
Each pickup becomes its own receipt in MealConnect. A receipt carries:
- The pickup date.
- The donor store. You can only choose stores your food bank has assigned to your agency.
- One or more lines, each with a category, the storage type (filled in from the category), sometimes a description, and the pounds.
You add the receipt, which sits as pending, and then submit it. Food banks set the rules around it, and they differ: many require every pound to be reported weekly, and many allow edits only for a short grace period, after which the receipt locks. If a scheduled pickup did not happen, MealConnect has an option to record that rather than leaving a gap.
Why the categories look different at your food bank
Receipt categories are set by each food bank and usually mirror the categories in its own warehouse system — produce, bakery, dairy, meat, dry grocery, non-food, prepared foods and so on, each with a code. The same code can mean different things at two food banks. Two practical consequences: weigh and sort by the categories your food bank uses, not a generic list, and if you prepare receipts anywhere outside MealConnect, map your own categories to theirs (several of yours can share one of theirs).
Uploading a week of receipts at once
MealConnect has a Bulk Upload feature for exactly this. The steps, as food banks and vendors describe them:
- In MealConnect, open Upload Receipts and choose Download Template. The Excel file lists the donor stores assigned to your account by banner and store number, and uses your food bank’s commodity codes as its columns.
- Enter each pickup’s date and store and the pounds under each commodity code, as the template lays them out.
- Back on Upload Receipts, choose Select Completed Template From Disk. MealConnect reads it and shows a summary.
- Review the receipts it created, then Submit Receipts.
Don’t see Upload Receipts? Bulk Upload is not switched on by default. Ask your food bank to request that Feeding America enable it for your agency’s account. If a new store is assigned to you later, download the template again so it appears.
Two things trip people up. Use only the codes in your own template — a code your food bank does not use cannot go in the file. And a store must be assigned to you before it can appear in the template; if one is missing, that is a question for your food bank, not a formatting problem.
The other records food rescue asks for
Receipts report the pounds. Food banks that run grocery rescue usually also require an agency to keep:
- Transport temperature logs for cold items — the store’s temperature and yours when it arrives.
- Daily refrigerator and freezer logs, kept for the period your agreement or State sets (see food pantry temperature logs).
- A recall log, so a recalled product can be traced to what you received and who took it (see what to do in a food recall).
Your agency agreement has the exact list and retention period for your food bank.
In California, grocery stores and supermarkets covered by SB 1383 must have a written agreement with the organization that recovers their food, and that organization keeps pounds per store per month (14 CCR §18991.5). See SB 1383 food recovery recordkeeping, the free SB 1383 food recovery log and edible food recovery agreements.
Doing it without re-typing
If you already log incoming food somewhere — a spreadsheet or inventory software — the fastest route is to produce the Bulk Upload rows from that record instead of entering each receipt twice. PantryPOS does this: rescue pickups logged on its Receive screen are grouped into one receipt per store per day with pounds under your food bank’s codes, ready to paste into the template, and the same pickup already carries its delivery temperature and lot record for the logs above. MealConnect has no public API, so this is a file you upload, not a live connection. PantryPOS is $39 a month for the first site with a free trial.