Nation's largest food distributor delivers
- Extra Table is non-profit based in Hattiesburg, Miss.
It's not your typical canned-food drive.
Extra Table, a new non-profit based in Hattiesburg, Miss., boasts that it can make donations go further for less money and at less effort for donors and food banks alike. Rather than relying on donations of individual cans of food, the group goes through Sysco, the nation's largest food distributor, to cut costs like a restaurant would.
Robert St. John, a chef and restaurateur in Hattiesburg, founded Extra Table in 2009 after a local food bank, the Edwards Street Fellowship Center, ran out of goods.
"I got a call — they had completely run out of food and called me kind of in a panic," St. John says. "I thought the quickest way to get them some help was to call my Sysco salesman."
His next thought? "I said, 'What would it look like if every restaurant had an extra table to feed the needy?'" St. John says. "I bet restaurants would give more freely and more easily if there were an easier way to do this."
Sysco's local branch signed on immediately, he says. Then he started getting calls from individuals who wanted to participate, so he enlisted the help of a few community foundations to handle donations. Now a shipment of pre-selected, healthy food is a phone call away for restaurants that use Sysco, or a click away for individuals to donate at extratable.org.
And if it's easy to give, it's even simpler for the food banks to receive the goods. The Edwards Street center amassed a small army of volunteers to unload the first shipment. Then Sysco did it for them. "That was one of the biggest surprises," says Raven Tyne, the group's executive director. "They had gotten like 20 volunteers to come out here, and they were ready to unload the truck."
Right now, the group's reach is limited. It is still building bases of donors for the 17 agencies it can serve with the current Sysco distributer. But St. John says there are plans to expand statewide the next two years.
The need is great: About one in five Mississippians have food insecurity, the highest rate of any state, according to Feeding America.
Eason also reports for The Clarion-Ledger in Jackson, Miss.