Have you ever wondered how our food bank packages work? Under normal circumstances, it’s a bit different, but under our current COVID regulations, here’s what we do:
We prepare all packages ahead of time, to ensure that clients can be in and out quickly rather than having to wait in the building for their package. The packages are intended to have enough food for about 4 days.
Everyone receives the Base Package. Then those with multiple people in their household will also receive an add-on package for 2, 3, 4, or 5 people. The exact make-up of the packages will vary based on what we’ve got in stock, and we try to include extras like cheese slices and desserts when we’ve got them, but here’s what we generally aim for.
In our base package, we aim to include these items. This works out to about a $38.50 value.
Then, there’s the add-on packages for those households with more than one person:
We estimate that the value of the add-on packages are:
2-person = $13.25
3-person = $21.75
4-person = $39.25
5-person = $57.25
Therefore, when we add these to the base package, the total cost of each package we give out is:
1 person household: $38.50
2 person household: $51.75
3 person household: $60.25
4 person household: $77.75
5 person household: $95.75
That can really add up quickly! Let’s take a look at our food bank stats from April 17. On that day, we had 39 households access our food bank. That is broken down as 31 single-person households, 5 two-person households, 2 three-person households, and 1 four-person household.
31 x $38.50 = $1,193.50
5 x $51.75 = $258.75
2 x $60.25 = $120.50
1 x $77.75 = $77.75
TOTAL = $1,650.50
So on April 17 alone – one of eight food bank days in April – we provided clients with $1,650.50 worth of food.
Interested in the cost for a full month? In March we helped:
207 single-person households
40 two-person households
14 three-person households
8 four-person households
1 five-person household
1 six-person household
That works out to a total of $11,735 worth of food! (And this is all excluding the Lunches for Learning packages we give out to families in need!)
We wanted to provide this breakdown of how our food bank works and the costs behind it so that you can fully understand how much we appreciate every donation that comes to us. We are always happy to receive monetary donations for the food bank (check out our Online Gift Catalogue here) or nonperishable items. You can use the lists above to see just how much of each item we go through.