Data quality & methodology

Every record on feedam.org passes through three tiers of trust verification before it surfaces in search.

Tier 3: Federal primary sources (highest trust)

• USDA Food and Nutrition Service — SNAP retailers, NSLP schools, SFSP summer sites, FDPIR commodity sites
• HRSA — Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs)
• State WIC agencies — clinic locations
• NCES Common Core of Data — schools serving meals
• OpenFEMA — disaster declarations + D-SNAP eligibility

Tier 2: Curated nonprofit partners

• Plentiful.org directory
• 211 state networks
• Salvation Army USA
• Regional food banks (Houston Food Bank, Feeding South Florida, etc.)

Tier 2b: Open-data sources

• OpenStreetMap — community fridges, soup kitchens, and food banks tagged social_facility=food_bank, social_facility=soup_kitchen, and amenity=food_sharing. Imported via the Overpass API. Records carry data_source=openstreetmap in the directory. Used under the Open Database License (ODbL 1.0). Attribution: © OpenStreetMap contributors.

Tier 1: Community-contributed (lowest, but verified)

Manual submissions via /submit-resource. Every Tier 1 record is reviewed against Tier 2/3 data for duplicates before surfacing.

Self-healing data

• Hours auto-downgrade — records not verified in 180 days have their hours marked "unknown" so users don't waste trips on stale info
• Crowd verification — a "this was helpful" tap from a search user resets the 180-day staleness timer
• Auto-deactivation — 2 "wrong info" reports in 30 days, or 3 "closed" reports, automatically hide a record
• Website HEAD checks — nightly cron checks every URL on every record; 3 failures clear the URL field
• Geocode drift detection — records >0.8° off their ZIP centroid get flagged; 2 drift observations auto-deactivate
• Dead-end pruning — records that are unverified AND have no phone AND no website are auto-deactivated. Without any way to actually contact the listing, they're dead-end results. 3,048 such records pruned in April 2026 via scripts/deactivate-dead-end-resources.sh
• Pantry-operator overrides — operators can claim listings (/pantry) and tap "Open Today / Closed Today / Low Stock" to override the inferred status

Deduplication

Every import passes through scripts/import-with-dedup.sh. Duplicates are identified by (LOWER(TRIM(name)), address, zip, resource_type) and the older record is kept (by min ID). 585+ duplicates removed in the deduplication system rollout (Feb 2026).

Refresh cadence