Correction
The print edition of this story and the initial posting online incorrectly identified the volunteers involved in dropping off bags and picking up donations. The information has been corrected here. The Gazette regrets the error.
Twenty-five thousand bags. Fifty thousand pounds of food. All set to roll into the Food Bank’s warehouse in less than three hours.
That’s the challenge awaiting St. Albert Food Bank and Community Village warehouse supervisor Doug Webster and his volunteers this Sept. 21 as the donations from the group’s annual food drive roll in.
“We’ll hopefully bring in 50,000 pounds of food in two-and-a-half hours,” he said, as he helped the St. Albert RCMP unload two carloads of food.
“It’s our largest food drive of the year.”
The Gazette asked Webster last week to walk through how he and the hundreds of volunteers involved would pull off this operation.
Whole lot of grub
A host of volunteers from local service clubs including St. Albert Lions, schools and other caring residents will fan out across St. Albert this week to deliver some 25,000 brown paper donation bags to every home in town for the food drive, Webster said.
On Sept. 21, volunteers from Red Willow Community Church (which provided the money for those donation bags) will collect those hopefully full bags and bring them to the Food Bank parking lot for sorting.
Webster said he and 55 volunteers will set up three lines in a drive-through format in the parking lot to accept the bags. Fresh and frozen food will be intercepted for hampers going out that same day. The rest of the food will be piled into those big triple-wall boxes used for watermelons, each of which will be weighed and put onto one of many currently empty shelves in the warehouse.
“Right now we’re the lowest we’ve ever been in terms of inventory,” Webster said of the warehouse.
“We usually have three times the tonnage we have at this moment.”
Webster said the tight supplies were because of unusually high demand for food hampers — some 647 went out the door last month, compared to 539 in August 2023. High food prices had also made donations a challenge.
Webster said he expects to fill about 100 of those big boxes with about 50,000 pounds of food on Sept. 21. Once they’re ready, volunteers will haul those boxes over to the sorting area, where they will check the expiry dates on the items within and sort them onto shelves just like in a grocery store.
In addition to the usual Kraft Dinner and soup cans, Webster said the Food Bank gets all sorts of oddities in its donation bins, including beds, seafood, fresh garden-picked vegetables, and (in one case) canned caviar.
“We don’t say 'no' to anything,” he said. Anything they can’t put into a food hamper gets passed to other charities such as LoSeCa or the Bissell Centre, and any food unfit for human consumption goes to feed pigs at a farm near Westlock.
Volunteers pull items off the shelves as needed to build hampers, the contents of which depend on a family’s size, needs, and what the warehouse has in stock, Webster said. Finished hampers are stored in shopping carts donated by local businesses (including defunct ones such as Hole’s Greenhouse and the St. Albert Target). About 30 families come in to pick up hampers each weekday.
If the September drive is successful, Webster said it should bring in about five months of food. Volunteers will probably be sorting the donations well into February.
Webster said residents can take part in the fall food drive by leaving their filled paper donation bag in plain view by their front door on Sept. 21 for pickup. Donations can also be made at the Food Bank itself from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on weekdays, or at donation bins across the city.
