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Arkansas leads the country in overall food insecurity with 21.2% of our population at risk of hunger. One in four kids goes to school hungry and Arkansas leads the country in terms of senior citizen hunger. In the spirit of The Good Samaritan, The Pack Shack is doing something to combat this and help our Arkansas neighbors.
The Pack Shack , a nonprofit based out of Rogers, focuses on providing nutritious, easy to prepare, and good tasting meals to local families in need. I recently attended a “fill the funnel” party, making 10,386 meals in one hour with 80 of my Arkansas Women Blogger friends. Here’s how it works.
We put on groovy hairnets, cranked up some awesome music, and created thousands of meals from dry ingredients in an assembly line process.
Spontaneous dance parties broke out.
The assembly line includes: funnels (where ingredients are poured into a funnel to fill a bag), scales (where bags are weighed for accuracy), heat sealers (where bags are sealed), and boxes (where the bags are put into cases).
The Pack Shack works with companies, organizations, churches, any kind of group that wants to get people together for fun Feed the Funnel parties. And, they are using Arkansas products.
“We’re extremely grateful for the expert assistance of the Tyson Foods culinary R&D team led by Chef Mario Valdovinos. They took our initial healthy meal and transformed it into something that everyone loves without sacrificing any of the important nutritional aspects of the meal,” commented Bret Raymond, co-founder and CEO of The Pack Shack. “Also, we’re thrilled that Riceland Foods is our rice supplier of choice. Their generous pricing allows us to pack more meals, and there’s something really special about using Arkansas rice to make a product that’s enjoyed by our neighbors in need throughout the state. We often say that the essence of The Pack Shack is meals packed by the community, in the community, for the community. Perhaps we should add “using rice supplied by the community!””
Arkansas Women Bloggers #AWBU 2015
Thousands of people in Arkansas have participated in The Pack Shack’s Feed the Funnel parties over the past year and a half, packing more than 2 million meals that have remained in the Natural State to help our neighbors in need.
September is Hunger Action month, so let’s take action Arkansas. To learn more about how your organization can #beneighborly, visit The Pack Shack website or call them directly at 479.650.4306
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