Doing what it takes to save food from being discarded

A little end of the week excitement at Foodshare on Friday.  As Food Donations Manager Paula Siebers tells the story:

 

"Last week I received a call from George Newman, Director of Distribution at Big Y.  Unfortunately, one of their locations had suffered a sprinkler malfunction overnight and George knew he had a lot of salvageable but WET product.  He wanted to know if Foodshare was interested in it.  Of course we were!

 

"Later that day, I got a text message from our Transportation Manager, Dom Piccini.  'How much were you expecting from Big Y?  You better come down to the warehouse.'  Once there I saw three sets of big eyes looking at a 53 foot trailer. 'It’s full,' Dom explained.  Off the truck came 20 pallets of food and personal care products.  We looked it over and could see that many of the case boxes were wet, but the product inside the packaging was all sealed in plastic.

"The next morning, Eric and Liz, our Reclamation Coordinators, got their Thursday volunteers on the job.  For hours they removed wet packaging and gave the plastic inner bags a wipe down and chance to dry.  Despite their great efforts that day, there was still a majority of pallets untouched.  We looked at Fridays’ group of scheduled volunteers and knew that even with the great work we knew would get done the next day, it wasn’t going to be enough.  What we needed was a special-ops/emergency team to come in remove wet packaging so we didn’t have pallets of mold and mildew growing in the warehouse come Monday.

"Our Volunteer Retail Pick up Coordinator, Gaye Sgamboti, sent out a cry-for-help email late Thursday asking any of our VRPU volunteers who had some time on Friday between 10-2 to please come give us a hand. We had no idea what to expect Friday, but we ended up having 19 volunteers come, and most of them were here for the full four hours!  In that time we got ALL of the food out of wet packaging and sorted for distribution, and all that was left was paper goods and personal care products.  These volunteers were AMAZING!  They were organized and efficient and worked cheerfully in the cold garage doing all that they could.  In fact, because we staged this special event in the garage area, we had to wrap up by 2pm in order to let the Mobile trucks back in.  There were a few volunteers that I almost had to pry donated wet product from their hands… they would have kept going until the last package was dry if I would have let them.

 

 

"A HUGE thank you to the incredible volunteers who make things like this a possibility.  This is a perfect example of the work that absolutely COULD NOT happen without the service of these amazing people.

"A HUGE thank you to George Newman at Big Y for thinking of Foodshare and making this incredible donation of cookies, crackers, cereal, sugar, baby wipes, diapers, tea, coffee,  and paper products totaling 24,578 pounds!"

 

And of course thank you to Paula and Gaye and everyone on the operations team at Foodshare who thought to call in new volunteers and to make use of the truck bays for this short-term one-time project!  Quick thinking, great organization, excellent job all the way around!