Food Lion donates mobile food pantry to Second Harvest
Clyde Flitzgerald and Meg Ham
On a week when Food Lion celebrated the remodeling of its stores, the grocery giant gave a mobile food pantry to Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina.
Food Lion held an event at its Peters Creek Parkway location to announce the donation on Monday. The semi-truck with trailer is worth more than $100,000 and will be used in the 18 counties that the area food bank serves.
Second Harvest Director Clyde Fitzgerald said the handicap accessible, climate controlled walk-in mobile pantry contains a room that Second Harvest can hold programs in and an aisle with shelves, refrigerators and freezers that’ll be filled with food. It’ll be used for nutrition education, food stamp assistance and cooking demonstrations along with providing food to various communities. It’s expected to hit the road next month. Locally, it will be used in areas like Boston Thurmond and the Cleveland Avenue area.
Fitzgerald said he told Food Lion that a mobile food pantry was a dream of his.
“What I dream about is a vehicle that will let us go out into communities and be an oasis in a food desert in rural areas and all kinds of places where we can do all kinds of things simultaneously,” said Fitzgerald.
The truck is just one aspect of Food Lion’s partnership with Second Harvest, which includes donations of food, money and volunteer hours. It’s part of the Food Lion Feeds initiative, which is committed to providing 500 million meals to those in need by the end of 2020.
This has been a big week for Food Lion, which has invested $178 million in the Greater Greensboro Area, which includes Winston-Salem. Yesterday, the chain gave away gift cards and tout bags to customers to celebrate remodeling all 93 of its stores in the market area. The remodeled stores feature a wider variety of craft beers, limited edition wines, grab-and-go items, pre-sliced deli meats, organic foods and gluten-free items. There’s also now signage to point out local foods on the new shelves. The Peters Creek store is the only store in the city that has a new walk-in garden cooler for produce, which the grocery chain is testing. Food Lion is also hiring 1,000 new associates in the market area.
“We are incredibly excited to, what I like to say, re-introduce Food Lion to communities that we’ve been a part of for a very long time,” said Food Lion President Meg Ham.
Food Lion, which is based in Salisbury, has 1,000 stores in 10 states. So far it has remodeled 473 stores with the remodeling of 71 stores in the Richmond, Virginia, market expected to be complete this year.
