AUSTIN, Texas — Now that the big game has come and gone, so has the 29th Annual Souper Bowl of Caring.
On Monday morning, the Central Texas Food Bank kicked off its Distribution Day, when all of the meals made possible through donations in the Souper Bowl of Caring are loaded up onto grocery store trucks and brought to the food bank to later be distributed to those in need.
Every year, organizers use the excitement and hype leading up to the Super Bowl to encourage community members to participate and support local hunger relief groups through money and food donations. The food bank partners with grocers like H-E-B, Randalls and Central Market to collect the donations through customers either purchasing an extra bag of food at checkout or a donation scan ticket.
Food bank staff said that the month of January can be particularly difficult to keep shelves stocked because both donations and volunteerism is low. In addition, the food bank also hosted three additional food drives to help support federal employees impacted by the government shutdown. Despite this, food bank staff and Souper Bowl organizers said the community stepped up.
"As always when we make a hard plea and say we really need help, I've not seen one instance where they have not stepped up right along with us," said Derrick Chubbs, President & CEO of Central Texas Food Bank. "And that's what's exciting. Our volunteers rolled in to help us package the goods that we would be distributing to the federal employees. We saw donations tick up a bit."
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"We had a lot going on in this last month that affects the product that is at our Central Texas Food Bank, so it was so important that we have the community support and we still have the community support even after the Super Bowl and after all the events have come and gone," said Alison Reese, Executive Director for the Souper Bowl of Caring. "One time a year, using the energy around the big game to do something really good for our community, that' the mission of the Souper Bowl of Caring, and I think we really reached that for the Central Texans this year in need."
This year's goal for the Souper Bowl of Caring, was to provide more than three million meals. Last week, the Food Bank released that they had collected 2.3 million meals.
With the drive ending Sunday night, organizers said they still need to make the final count of how many meals exactly were raised, a number that's expected to be released either later Monday or Tuesday.