Community grocery feeds thousands
Food Bank of the Rockies feeds nearly 135,000 people in Colorado and Wyoming on any given day.
It’s a number that has only increased over the last four years — from a total of 37.6 million meals distributed in 2013 to nearly 50 million distributed this year.
“We know that 1 in 10 people in Colorado worries about what they’re going to eat,” said Janie Gianotsos, Food Bank of the Rockies spokeswoman.
That ratio tightens to 1 in 6 when it comes to children, Gianotsos said.
Which is why Food Bank of the Rockies wants to keep up the work it has been doing since 1978 — providing tons and tons of nonperishable food and fresh fruits and vegetables to hundreds of food pantries with needy clientele throughout northern Colorado and Wyoming.
“We serve as the grocery store for 600 hunger relief programs,” Gianotsos said.
Two of those programs are Tricity Food Bank in Westminster and a food pantry at Woodside Baptist Church in Denver. Esther Von, director of the programs, said her organization picks up 7,000 to 12,000 pounds of food a week from Food Bank of the Rockies.
“We have two box trucks,” she said. “Food Bank of the Rockies is very critical to our operations. They’re excellent to work with.”
Tri-city and Woodside feed about 1,000 families a month, Von said, and “in the holidays and the winter, we see even higher volumes.”
That’s where Food Bank of the Rockies’ 108,000-square-foot warehouse at the junction of Interstate 70 and Havana Street in Denver comes into play. Inside, food lines shelves and fills freezers and refrigerators, ready to load onto trucks headed to pantries in 30 Colorado counties.
Food Bank of the Rockies buys 14 percent of its food — at a cost of nearly $2.8 million a year — and gets 15 percent from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The agency gets the largest slice of its inventory from “food rescues,” or food deemed not fit for sale by grocery stores.
Gianotsos said the 18.5 million pounds of food the organization rescued from grocery stores last year is closely inspected to ensure it won’t make anyone ill.
“Food safety is very, very important,” she said. “It’s usually the dented can or maybe the box that got opened but the contents are still sealed.”
More than 23,000 people volunteer with Food Bank of the Rockies annually and contribute 123,000 hours to the organization.