Big Y donates and employees volunteer

Big Y began donating meat from the 11 stores in our service area to Foodshare in November 2013.  They would like to see a program similar to our Meat the Need program in other food banks in the region, but know that it takes a tremendous amount of volunteer hours to get the meat sorted and inspected before it can be distributed.  In an effort to give back to the community, they are considering doing the meat sorting process with Big Y volunteers at their Springfield MA warehouse!   Meat could then go direct to the food banks already pre-sorted and ready for distribution. 

Today George Newman, Director of Distribution of Big Y, brought Sue Asselin and Karyn Ardimi (also from Big Y) to Foodshare for training in our Meat the Need program.  Liz Holt, one of our Reclamation Coordinators, gave these “volunteers” a detailed version of her “on-the-job-training” , teaching them how to inspect and sort the beef, poultry and pork in to labeled boxes. 

In their training process a couple hundred pounds of meat was sorted!  Thanks Big Y!