St. Vincent de Paul Atlanta

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Thursday, June 30, 2011

This week received over 1000 pounds of frozen meat from one of the companies that donated food to us as part of our food pantry distribution program.  This meat; perfectly good, healthy, tasty, and nutritious would have been thrown away a few months ago.  Dumped into a dumpster because it had exceeded the stores sell date.  Can you imagine that!  One thousand pounds of perfectly good high protein food that could feed literally thousands of people - and without our food program it would have been trashed.

We're pretty excited about the food pantry distribution program.  It works pretty simply. We have agreements with partners stores who pull food from their shelves when it is still good, but outside the company policy on selling it.  On a regular basis (usually weekly) we send a refrigerated truck to pick up the food and we bring it back to our main warehouse and distribution center in Chamblee where have an industrial size refrigerator/freezer unit.  There it is sorted and re-packed into smaller boxes with a variety of items.  Our 38 food pantries then come in and pick up the food for distribution to people in need in their local area.  This week some of that 1000 pounds of meat (picked up in Atlanta) was redistributed as far away as Blairsville!

We are at the very edge of the capabilities of this program.  With additional refrigerated trucks and additional industrial freezer capacity we could expand the program greatly.

Imagine it.  In ONE day we received over 1000 pounds of food.  In ONE day.  That food will help maybe 3000 or 4000 people who would have been hungry without it.  All from the food we received in ONE day.  If we had the capacity to expand this program so that we could pick up 1000 pounds of food EVERY DAY what an impact we could make on hunger and need in Georgia.

Imagine it.  Make it real.

John Berry
Executive Director