It's missing at every nook and corner.
Too little food, too few employees, too many people to take care of.
The problems the Frankfurter Tafel has been struggling with have been the same for years, but now the situation has gotten even worse.
But that's not due to rising poverty in old age or inflation, says Rainer Häusler, honorary chairman of the Frankfurter Tafel.
Rather, it is due to the fact that since the beginning of the war in the Ukraine, the food bank has also been taking care of several thousand refugees from there who are now living in Frankfurt.
Food has been getting scarcer for years anyway.
Supermarkets can plan their orders more precisely because they can track when and how much is sold.
This means that less is left over in the evening – good for business, bad for the table.
But even if twice as much food were available: "We wouldn't know what to do with it." Häusler shrugs his shoulders a little helplessly.
Because employees are also missing.
There are fifteen in each issuing office, all volunteers, most of them pensioners.
Queues are getting longer and longer
The delivery times, like the queues, are getting longer and longer.
In addition, the rooms have to be prepared for two hours in the morning and cleaned and tidied up again for an hour and a half in the evening.
Because these are rooms that churches or non-profit associations make available, for example, and then use them again themselves.
Shifts that were supposed to last six hours sometimes grow to twelve hours.
The food bank now supplies up to 30,000 needy people a month: 12,000 of them are "regulars" at the twelve distribution points, 15,000 receive food from other facilities such as Caritas kitchens or assisted living.
Another 3,000 to 5,000 people have fled Ukraine and are now living in Frankfurt.
The list of where and when food is distributed is now also available in Ukrainian.
For some time now, the needy have only been able to come every fortnight, not every week, and things are getting tight for everyone.
Some dispensaries regularly have to stop taking in new arrivals when food threatens to run out too soon.
Then the newcomers have to wait until the regulars are taken care of before the staff can try to outfit them too.
Exactly when that will happen cannot be said with certainty.
"There are twelve individual situations, and stopping admission must be decided on a situational basis," says Häusler.
That depends on how many people are expected and how full the cooling is.
Internally, if a position is in a very bad shape, you always try to "pretty up" its existence, but that's not always possible.
For a while it was 150 to 170 people who were cared for at each distribution point, "now we're almost 200," says the chairman.
“We try to intercept it and distribute it to everyone.
If everyone is a bit affected, that's better than just one person.” Nobody was able to plan the attack on Ukraine, says Häusler, and the board is not designed for such “spontaneous operations”.
The initial welcoming culture, i.e. the willingness to take in refugees for a longer period of time and look after them, has also decreased.
"In the first three, four, five days you even saw that our regular guests shared with the refugees and gave them food from their own pockets."
But the regulars have to rely on their pockets themselves, and the new volunteers who enlisted at the start of the war didn't stay long.
"The pictures of people with teddy bears at the train stations are always nice, but that only lasts a few weeks." The long-term help then falls back on the table.