WOW, what a week, and Saturday was the frosting on the cupcake!

WOW, what a week, and Saturday was the frosting on the cupcake! We had massive donations capped off with 2 extra pallets from the food bank, making a total of 7 instead of the 5 I ordered. I estimate over 3000 pounds of food! I have no clue what they think we can do with all that lettuce! Lots of the lettuce did go out, and the rest went to Carol’s house for the neighbors, the FreeFridge, and compost. Our setup team really stepped up, moving all the food in from the cars and trucks, then quickly unloading pallets and arranging the food. How so much gets done in so little time is always AMAZING. It is always heartwarming to have members of the community step up and offer to help out.

Putting excess from CTFB along the side of the building is moving out more food, but the people were a little too enthusiastic in their shopping. Next week, we will have a designated person stay out there to keep things moving in a more orderly manner. Thanks to the afternoon serving crew who never lost their smiles and got people to take a lot of food, more than I thought we could. We also moved over 12 cases of donuts yesterday.

The Thanksgiving giveaway is next week. We will have a table set up with the sides for them to select, and turkey breast halves/ rotisserie chickens at the back to complete their bag. They will shop the pantry as usual, adding whatever we have to their bags. We have planned for around 140 tickets to participate. I have a volunteer to handle registering and handing out tickets. People will still sign up for the pantry as usual. We have already distributed 40+ tickets.

Pantry stats 11/15/25
Total registered 155
Total household 449
Total over 60 135
Total kids incl. outreach 128+50
Total Unhoused incl. outreach 19+70+94+114
Total volunteers 47+12
Food donated/salvaged this week: 7890 pounds (approx)
20,754 pounds so far this month! up 27%

We always get a surge of people at this time because lots of pantries close for Thanksgiving and Christmas. We do not close, but we get a lot of extra food from one of those pantries. We are seeing so many more people every week than we did last year that numbers evade me. I expect we will see around 200 on a couple of the Saturdays. We have also been blessed with many cash donations in the last few weeks to enable us to purchase food that is not donated. We are in very good shape to serve the community. If you have not seen our home page and the impact we make (in numbers), take a look: Home page

We are so very thankful for all the volunteers each week. We really appreciate their time. They could choose any place, and they chose us.
Dianne & Carol

We are committed to allowing our clients to make their own selections instead of a pre-packed bag. It takes longer to distribute this way, but clients get food they want and will eat. Over the last couple of years we have gotten frequent donations of food that the clients were given at other pantries but would not eat. It is not culturally acceptable, or they just do not like that food, or do not know what to do with it. Several of our volunteers offer suggestions on fixing items too.

Our commitment is not to run out of food at the end of the pantry. We took 6 coolers full of frozen /refrigerated food back yesterday for next week. The shelves are full at both Carol’s and my place with canned goods, packaged items, snacks, etc. We will be upping the amount we give out to reduce the inventory over the next month or so.

Thanks to our many donors: #sproutsfarmersmarket, #target,#specs, #costco, #pizzahut, #loveservefeed, #CentralTexasFoodBank, #LoneStarFamily, #McDonalds , #CanteenSnackandCoffee, #PeJCatering, and all the people in the community who support us with donations of food and $$.