Announcing CAFB’s New Director of Farm to Family

The California Association of Food Banks is thrilled to announce that Maria Houlne has joined us as the new Director of our Farm to Family program. Her expertise in logistics and supply chain management, coupled with extensive experience in food banking and trade associations, will strengthen CAFB’s leadership team and provide exceptional management and innovation to the Farm to Family program.

Maria is an accomplished supply chain professional with experience in a variety of industries, mostly nonprofit. Most recently she comes from Vision Share, a nonprofit eye bank member organization where she was their Distribution Director / Program Manager. She also brings more than a decade’s worth of experience in food supply chain and logistics with experience at Nabisco and Feeding America.

In her 11 years at Feeding America, she served as Logistics Manager, Director of Logistics, and finally as the Vice President of Logistics. She developed an online warehouse capacity tool and initiated the first Transportation Management System (TMS) for food banks. She designed and coordinated the development of an award-winning online allocation system, established the organization’s first large-scale purchasing program, and advised a network fleet of over 1,500 power units. She also launched Relief Fleet, a major initiative to secure free and reduced-rate freight for food banks through partnerships with leaders in the transportation industry.

At Feeding America, Maria designed and implemented systems to effectively process food and grocery donations and directed daily operations to move almost 400 million pounds of donated food and grocery products from over 5,000 origins to over 200 destinations across the country. 

We could not imagine a better fit for this role. Her innovation, industry knowledge, and logistical expertise are huge assets to CAFB and the food banks we serve. We are excited to welcome Maria aboard.