Waiting for Milk: A Nonmarket Valuation Approach to Food Pantry Demand by Food Category

This paper studies how food pantry clients value different food items. Using survey data from local food pantry users, the analysis measures the importance of specific pantry items through respondents’ stated willingness to wait, defined as the number of minutes they are willing to wait for each item. The empirical analysis applies a two-part framework to distinguish two dimensions of item importance. The first part examines the extensive margin: whether a respondent is willing to wait for a given item at all. The second part examines the intensive margin: how long the respondent is willing to wait conditional on reporting a positive waiting time. This framework allows the paper to evaluate both whether pantry clients treat an item as worth waiting for and how strongly they value it once they are willing to wait.