AUBURN – With more Mainers going hungry – straining hundreds of soup kitchens, food pantries and homeless shelters across the state – the Good Shepherd Food-Bank plans to distribute tons more food.

For five weeks, the charity plans to lower the pennies per pound it charges agencies for its food. In the case of some frozen items, the bank plans to give them away.

“This is a calling,” Executive Director Rick Small said Tuesday morning. “Our mission really is getting as much food to hungry people as needed.”

Luckily, finances have been strong for Good Shepherd.

At the end of the holiday season, an online donation system had raised more than $60,000 and drew an additional $25,000 match from an anonymous donor. The “virtual food drive” continues at www.gsfb.org.

The holiday money will fund the current initiative.

“It’s not that we’re all set,” Small said. “We’re not.” In fact, about $900,000 is owed on the food bank’s massive $3 million warehouse in Auburn.

The hungry folks seemed more important, Small said.

For months, the food bank has been seeing demand for food rise sharply, by about 25 percent, among the its member agencies.

Much of the demand appears to be among people squeezed by rising fuel prices. Food bank spokeswoman JoAn Chartier described them Tuesday as being forced to make the decision whether to “heat or eat.”

By cutting the cost of food to its charities, Small hopes that more edibles will get to the folks who need them.

The temporary price changes took effect on Tuesday.

Food that the bank has been selling for 16 cents per pound, canned goods and other non-perishable items, dropped to 13 cents per pound. Most frozen foods fell from 16 to 8 cents per pound. And hundreds of freezer items – boneless chicken, haddock and beef – were changed to free.

Small hopes the price change will trigger about a 25 percent increase in the amount of food purchased by charities.

But he was unsure what to expect as word of the change spread.

“It’s a pretty well-calculated risk,” he said. “But it is a risk.”

Plans call for the regular crew of volunteers to take on the additional work.

“We’ll handle it,” Small said.

The can-do initiative is being done in honor of JoAnn Pike, the food bank’s founder, who died in 2004.

Pike and her husband started Good Shepherd with a prayer group from their church in the early 1980s. They collected their first food from garbage bins outside local markets and stored it in Pike’s Auburn home.

Last year, the charity distributed 10 million pounds of food.

“I never even met JoAnn, but I think this is what she had in mind,” he said.