The VanDyck Foundation

Meal Box Delivery Program Recipients of the Fresh Food Weekly program could pick and choose meal box food items they did and did not want to receive in each biweekly meal box delivery. Recipients did this by submitting an online Food Order Form for each meal box they received. Once program recipients filled out their food order form it was received in a chart which could be downloaded to a CSV file and uploaded to a spreadsheet. An automated email from Wix was also generated after recipients submitted their biweekly food order forms. Another email was triggered to Leah’s phone and listed each recipient’s food order in written form. On the morning of each delivery day our volunteers would go pickup our wholesale orders or bulk donations and bring them to our operating facility (a church basement). This location could also be called a fulfillment facility since it's where all the food is brought to be individually packaged (if needed) and packed into individual meal boxes to be picked-up by volunteers and then delivered to program recipients. We started creating plan-o-grams to ease the drop-off of bulk orders from pickup volunteers. On the morning of delivery days volunteer pickup drivers could easily view the plan-o-gram to find out where they should put the food after they picked it up and arrived with it at the fulfillment space (the church basement). Implementing the plan-o-gram ended up reducing a significant amount of unnecessary heavy-lifting. Additionally the use of table signs indicating which food item to be placed on it also helped make the process of dropping off the bulk food easier for the volunteer pickup drivers. Once food was picked up from suppliers and brought to the church it was placed strategically around the fulfillment room in the same order the food was listed on the ‘Packer Food Order Form’. When food is sourced in bulk it sometimes requires labour support to re-package it into smaller individual portions or just to package it period. For example all of our lettuce heads come in cases of 24. Once it was received it was bagged into bags perfectly-sized for each type of lettuce head. This is all part of the food safety and handling process and also takes into consideration the likelihood that recipients don’t have adequate food storage at home such tin foil plastic wrap zip loc bags or Tupperware. For holiday meal box delivery days there was always more. We had to rent a cooler trailer for those days.

Throughout the month of August Fresh Food Weekly hosted a total of seven two-hour healthy cooking workshops for kids at Countryside United Church in Thornton Ont. Our two-hour cooking workshops were for children between the ages of six and 13. Children were taught about the importance of a well-balanced diet and how certain foods affect the body in different ways. Each child made their own dinner and dessert which they could proudly bring home to the family to eat that night. All food supplies and cookware were provided and volunteers helped to ensure everyone was getting the most value out of the workshops. Although the biweekly meal box delivery program closed down in January 2024 we still ended the fiscal year off with a final fundraiser that raised funds for an Easter toy and candy for kids under the age of 13.