Land O’Lakes has donated nearly 40,000 pounds of macaroni and cheese to the Great Plains Food Bank.
The donation helps to meet growing demand throughout the distribution area. Pastor Devlyn Brooks is CEO of Churchs United in Moorhead, which runs the Dorothy Day Food Pantry and receives distributions from Great Plains Food Bank three days a week. He says between March and April of this year, demand at Dorothy Day grew over 43 percent – and donations like these are crucial to keeping people in the community fed.
"In the past couple of months, we've been averaging more than a hundred households every day we do distribution. Those are non-duplicated households, so if we do some quick math - anywhere from 100, 125 households per distribution day - and again, that's households, not individuals - but we average between a 100 and 125 households every distribution day, three days a week. That gets to 375 households that we serve in one week."
Great Plains Food Bank’s partner network includes 196 food pantries, shelters, soup kitchens and other charitable feeding programs. They operate in 100 communities across North Dakota and in Clay County, Minnesota.