ANTICIPATION:  ONE MILLION ADDITIONAL POUNDS OF FOOD PER YEAR! 

The national office of Feeding America recently completed their five year strategic plan.  The plan calls for increasing the number of clients served by one million per year.   The plan also calls for increasing food donations by one billion pounds over the next 5 years.  To help satisfy these lofty goals, especially donated pounds, Feeding America has diligently been pursuing new sources for food donations.  To this end, for the past few years Feeding America has been negotiating with the National Headquarters of grocery chains like Wal-Mart/Sams, Krogers, etc. to be able to pick up their perishables and shelf-stable products which do not meet standards for retail sale, but remain safe for consumption. Prior to negotiations, most of these products were being thrown away by the stores.  Under the new program, the Feeding America food bank servicing the area in which the store is located regularly visits the store, picks up these items, and brings them back to the food bank for distribution to its member agencies. 

Piloting the retail store pickup program in the fall of 2008, our food bank and networking partners currently pick up food from 14 Kroger, 18 Wal-Mart Supercenters and 2 Sam’s Club stores located within our service area, all of which will be participating in the program.  Bill Wilson, our Special Projects Coordinator, has worked extremely hard in implementing this program and overseeing the logistical aspects of the program.  We anticipate an additional one million pounds of food per year to be collected and distributed to our member agencies through this program!

*A special thanks to the Lincy Foundation for the $100,000 grant provided to FAKH and the Walmart Foundation for an $85,000 truck to support this program!