Every week we get 100s to 1000s of pounds of food donated, 30,797 pounds in March, from a variety of places. A lot of it is perishable and is distributed within the week. Sometimes it leans heavily on the baked and sweet end, sometimes we get lots of vegetables or fruits, sometimes a lot of dairy. We also get cereal at intervals but the staple stuff: pasta, flour, beans, rice, and tomato products are few so we buy them with our cash donations.
Our Spring for Food drive in March was very successful and netted us over $3000 for staple items with a couple of matches still to be disbursed. This is huge for us and will carry us for several months.
We must be doing something right as we have been so very blessed this lately. We are so very thankful to be receiving these donations of staple items. Several persons saw our gift list on Amazon and my porch was full of macaroni, soups, shelf stable milk and canned tomatoes. I also got a huge donation of cooked chicken in foil packets that help those who cannot cook or keep food refrigerated.
We received a donation from the SXSW SVC Serve Team, donated to us by their great partner Convoy of Hope out of Georgia https://convoyofhope.org/about/ These are targeted to the vulnerable and underserved. We got ramen soup, cereals, applesauce, peanut butter, and more.
These items beef up our staples saving us cash. We also got 3 boxes full of COMPOSTABLE bags from Target today to help with the Zero waste initiative with the City. We are participating in a program with them to reimburse us and this saves both of us $$.
We got this message from the national rep at the Canteen: Austin, TX enacted an organics waste reduction plan requiring all food business to divert organic waste. Our Austin Canteen branch shared they do regular food recovery pick ups with you. We are going to add food recovery of nonperishable foods (chips, cookies, granola bars) that are at their best buy date so you should see an uptick in amount of food coming your way as well FYI.