Oh! Someone mentioned fod for people with specific diets, like coeliac etc.
Check with your local bank. Sometimes very specific foods don't have a very long use by date and some can go to waste, depending on who is using the bank at any given time. I know that when our daily bag was designed, like every other daily bag, there were a variety of alternative diets catered for - diabetic, coeliac, vegetarian and vegan being the obvious ones.
I know that we have a local supermarket that usually supplies Free From type stuff if we ask. Other food banks have similar agreements with their local shops.
You can donate anything you want. Yep! We may not be able to add it to the bags but we have a much used Help Yourself Shelf for all the 'off list' items and our local allotment group makes a lovely display under it. We try and make sure everyone leaves with something from the display, but we can't push. We often have no idea what facilities our clients have.
Having said that, the young family that only had a kettle for a few weeks and was living off anything that you only had to add hot water to was doing really well, being very imaginative with food plans. Over last autumn / winter they were taking all the light vegetables, leafy stuff, peas etc and adding it to cans of lentils and beans. They took all the sauces, oil based sice mixes we had too. They'd hold it in a couple of large thermos flasks until it all warmed through.
We managed to get a few weird pudding packets for them, semolina, custard that kind of thing. The eldest child wrote a How To booklet for us, and some of those puddings are really, really nice, once you add chocolate chips etc to them!
Makes you feel really, really small sometimes!