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Abstract In the United States, food banks play an important role in helping to reduce the rate of food insecurity by distributing donated food among the population in need. One of the challenges that food banks face is to equitably distribute food donations among their clients such that, ideally, each recipient receives the same amount of food. They aim to do so while minimizing waste that occurs due to spoilage and capacity limitations. Perishable food items present specific challenges since they are susceptible to spoilage and need to be distributed before their expiry dates. Based on our longstanding partnership with a large food bank located in the southeastern United States, we present a capacitated, multiperiod, multiproduct network flow model to help them equitably and effectively distribute perishable food donations among the food‐insecure population in their service region. The model is applied within the context of a case study and reveals managerial insights that would be useful to practitioners. Our findings show that although equity is one of the food bank's highest priorities, inequities cannot be eliminated completely. Given the inevitability of inequitable food allocations in practice, this paper provides food banks guidance on how to strategically control inequities using two approaches: (i) by increasing the number of periods for which equity should be satisfied or () by allowing deviations from a perfectly equitable distribution. The results show that modest deviations from perfect equity using either approach can lead to significant improvements in both the quality and quantity of food distributed and can also reduce food waste. While approach () is preferable, the most desirable outcomes occur when both are applied simultaneously. We also find that county capacities inhibit a food bank's ability to achieve balance between equity and effectiveness when distributing perishables. Our framework provides food banks the flexibility to balance the trade‐off between effectiveness and equity based on their preferences. 

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals provide a road map for countries to achieve peace and prosperity. In this study, we address two of these sustainable development goals: achieving food security and reducing inequalities. Food banks are nonprofit organizations that collect and distribute food donations to food‐insecure populations in their service regions. Food banks consider three criteria while distributing the donated food: equity, effectiveness, and efficiency. The equity criterion aims to distribute food in proportion to the food‐insecure households in a food bank's service area. The effectiveness criterion aims to minimize undistributed food, whereas the efficiency criterion minimizes the total cost of transportation. Models that assume predetermined weights on these criteria may produce inaccurate results as the preference of food banks over these criteria may vary over time, and as a function of supply and demand. In collaboration with our food bank partner in North Carolina, we develop a single‐period, weighted multi‐criteria optimization model that provides the decision‐maker the flexibility to capture their preferences over the three criteria of equity, effectiveness, and efficiency, and explore the resulting trade‐offs. We then introduce a novel algorithm that elicits the inherent preference of a food bank by analyzing its actions within a single‐period. The algorithm does not require direct interaction with the decision‐maker. The non‐interactive nature of this algorithm is especially significant for humanitarian organizations such as food banks which lack the resources to interact with modelers on a regular basis. We perform extensive numerical experiments to validate the efficiency of our algorithm. We illustrate results using historical data from our food bank partner and discuss managerial insights. We explore the implications of different decision‐maker preferences for the criteria on distribution policies.