Archive: Around Town

Lansing Market met its goal Tuesday to provide $1,000 worth of food to the Lansing Food Pantry.  The brain child of Grocery Manager Shannon Canino, the store raised the goal to $1,200.  Canino said there was a good chance the store would exceed that goal as well.  She is thrilled that it is exceeding her expectations.

"We wanted to do something for the food pantry," she says.  "We also adopted three families from the food pantry.  We bought them Christmas presents and donated dinner.  We wanted to do more.  I saw other stores doing something like this and it gave me the idea to do it for our food pantry."

The idea is very simple.  $3, $5, and $10 are displayed in the store entrance.  Customers pick them up and purchase them with their other groceries.  The store then collects the bags in a bin to be picked up by Food Pantry Director Nancy Myers.


"We wanted to make it easy for customers to participate," says store manager Sandro Mironti.  "A lot of our customers said they wanted to do something.  Shannon's idea was, how do we make it easy for them so they don't have to buy it, package it, bring it to a drop-off place.  Shannon thought if we could make it as easy as possible for them we'd get more participation from our customers.  So far they've come through with flying colors."

Canino says the promotion will continue through Christmas Eve Day, and that she will continue to raise the goal as previous goals are met.  By late Tuesday morning 195 bags of food had been sold for a total of $1,065.  The $5 bags have been the best sellers, followed by $3 bags and then $10.

Canino fills the bags with items that could go together to make a meal.  That provides a good combination of foods for people to choose from.  Myers picks up the bags every few days, then distributes the contents at the food pantry.  She takes the products out of the bags to distribute, then reuses the bags for food pantry users to take their food in.  Many customers have bought more bags when they come back to the market.  Mironti says one in particular has bought a bag every time she comes to shop.

"She said, 'I'm so pressed for time.  Now I can do something for people that need it without having to go crazy with my time.'  So it worked out well for our customers as well as for the food pantry," he says.

Mironti says that this effort will be repeated, most likely around holiday times.  He notes that a lot of local people are going hungry and need assistance.

"We want to put a huge thank you out to the community," he says.  "We're doing a little of the work, but they're the ones who are donating.  They are really the heroes in the community... Shannon for inspiring our customers to do that and customers for coming through and doing what they've done so far to raise $1,000 of food.  It's really an assessment of the kind of customers we have."

v8i48