This week is your chance to support an uptown Saint John soup kitchen for another year.
The 18th annual Ritchie’s Food Drive for Romero House runs from Monday through Saturday.
“We’re just at the very end of a long year and we’ve used a tremendous amount of food, as you can imagine, so we’re really looking forward to stocking up the pantry again,” Evelyn McNulty, executive director of Romero House, told our newsroom.
The soup kitchen served 152,000 meals last year and McNulty expects that number will be similar this year.
She said that is about 78 per cent higher than before COVID, when their highest year was 82,000 meals.
McNulty said the food drive is critical for the soup kitchen, which has relied solely on community donations for the past four decades.
“It provides us with a really, really, really good base of the staples that we use throughout the year. So it allows us to augment that during the year with different food drives and by purchasing food that we’re missing,” she said.
McNulty said some of the items on their wish list include staples like pasta, instant potatoes, basmati rice, canned soup and pepper. You can find a full list on our website.
The food drive is also accepting cash donations, which McNulty said they will also use to purchase food.
“The volume of the food that we’re using is tremendous. We use almost a year’s worth of a house’s food in one day,” she said.
The food drive takes place at Ritchie’s on Rothesay Avenue from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Thursday, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Friday and 8 a.m. until noon on Saturday.
