On March 16th, AFS partnered with the Utah Food Bank to facilitate Feed Utah, a statewide food drive that helps provide food to Utahns across the state who face hunger—many of whom are still struggling to feed their families due to inflation and high housing costs.
Last year, record donation totals came in for the 2023 Feed Utah food drive, where 250,000 lbs. of food were donated at Macey’s stores, collected, and distributed to local food pantries. This year, over 783,225 lbs. of food were donated to Lin’s and Macey’s stores across the state of Utah, more than triple of last year.
The Macey’s and Lin’s teams took donations as drop-off locations where volunteers across the state deposited food collected in local neighborhoods with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints volunteer group, Just Serve.
“I am so proud of our store teams,” said Candice Fischer, Director of CRM. “There’s a lot of organization and planning our ASD’s (Assistant Store Director) do to make sure that our stores can serve as drop off locations. It’s not only an opportunity for us to collect food for our local food pantries, it gives our team the ability to connect with the communities we serve.”
Associated Food Stores drivers also took part in picking up food and dropping it off at local food pantries. A fleet of drivers were excited to help with Utah’s largest food drive to assist the 1 in 10 Utah children who are food insecure and the 317,000 Utahns who are at risk of missing a meal today.
The donations collected at participating ARO retail stores for Feed Utah supplied 652,688 meals to Utahns, which is the equivalent of feeding a family of 8 for 75 years.
AFS is proud to participate in this worthy cause and celebrates how our team truly embodies our mission of “enriching lives one grocer, one family; one meal at a time.”