126,010 pounds of food collected at Food For Families in Copperas Cove

By BRITTANY FHOLER 

Cove Leader-Press 

The Copperas Cove H-E-B Plus! participated in the 30th annual Food For Families food drive all day Friday, collecting a total of 126,010 pounds of donated food. 

Dozens of volunteers spent their Friday organizing canned foods and dry goods into boxes to be divided up among four different ministries: the Holy Family Catholic Church’s My Brother’s House, Cove House, Refuge Corporation and the Benevolence Ministry of First Baptist Church. 

Doris McCrary, director of Baptist Benevolence Ministry, was at H-E-B Plus! making sure everything went smoothly. 

“This is the 30th anniversary of the Food for Families, and all of the Central Texas cities are doing this through HEB and KWTX T.V., and it’s an annual thing, and it’s something that will fill our shelves for the whole year, just about,” McCrary said. 

Food For Families is an annual project for the Longhorn Council Boy Scouts of America, H.E.B. Grocery Company, and KWTX News 10. Every year, on the Friday before Thanksgiving, they join together with food pantries across Central Texas in Coryell County, Bell County, Bosque County, Falls County, Freestone County, Hill County, Limestone County, McLennan County and Milam County to collect non-perishable food items.

Early unofficial numbers show this year’s food drive raised 2,318,361 pounds of food, exceeding last year’s record total of 2,221,369 pounds by about 97,000 pounds, according to KWTX. 

The Copperas Cove H-E-B Plus! had sold more than 10,000 pre-bagged and pre-weighed bundles of food, with each bag containing items like canned vegetables and canned fruit, along with other ingredients to make a home-cooked meal. This helped push the collected total to a little over 110,000 pounds of food before noon, McCrary said. 

“It is just tremendous,” she said. “The people of Copperas Cove have truly gave this year. I think the worse the weather, the better, the more food we get. We are all just astonished at how much food we are getting, but it’s great because it will help us feed the people that really, truly need it.”

By 11 a.m., the site had received a truck full of donated food items, estimated to be about 6,000 pounds of food collected by House Creek Elementary School. 

“Schools are doing a tremendous job this year,” McCrary said. “House Creek has probably got 6,000 to 8,000 pounds of food, and for children to do that is unbelievable.”

The food has to stay in Copperas Cove, so all collected items will be divided among the four ministries and then distributed so that those ministries can serve the community. 

“Our shelves right now are empty, and so this food will truly fill them,” McCrary said about the Benevolence Ministry. 

Shirley Bennett has volunteered at the Food for Families event in Copperas Cove for three years now. 

“It’s crazy but it’s great because it’s for such a good purpose,” she said. “I think it’s great. It’s a onetime thing and you get a thing together at that one time and it’s the giving season now, so that I think makes people more willing to donate and to help.”

She summed up the process in one sentence: “Grab a can, find a box.”