More than 300 families filled cars with food at last week’s drop at Deseret Peak Complex

Monthly food drops at Deseret Peak Complex are getting larger as more local families seek assistance during tough economic times.

The Utah Food Bank DROPS program for Tooele County has seen a 50 percent increase in the number of families accepting food since last summer, according to organizers.

“The increase started slowly back in the summer,” said Carrie Kline, a Tooele resident and volunteer organizer with the program. “We were seeing about 200 families a month. That has increased to over 300.”

DROPS stands for Delivery Redistribution of Produce and Surplus. It’s a program of the Utah Food Bank where perishable and surplus foods that have been donated to the food bank are delivered to needy people in communities throughout the state, according to Kline.

“We never know what kind of food we will be getting,” said Kline. “Most of the food we distribute is perishable or dated in nature. We get things like fresh fruit, vegetables, milk, sometimes meat. One time we received cases and cases of apples. Every family went home with a case of apples, larger families got two. One time we received a bunch of frozen McRib patties from McDonalds.”

Tooele County has a regularly scheduled food drop at Deseret Peak on the Friday following the first Monday of each month. The drop has been going on in the county for 12 years, according to Lori Sandoval, director of the Tooele County Food Bank.

“We used to do it at our Maple Street location and it grew too big for us, then it moved to the First Baptist Church, and now it is at Deseret Peak,” Sandoval said.

Food for the drop comes in a semi-truck loaded on pallets. The county, through Deseret Peak Complex, donates the use of a fork lift to unload the truck, Cline said.

Everybody that shows up for the food drop signs in with their name and the number of people in their household.

“They line their cars up and in an orderly fashion volunteers help them load food into their vehicle,” Cline said. “The food is for the those in need, those unemployed and struggling to make ends meet. Sometimes they are homeless. It is kind of an honor system. We don’t check their backgrounds. We do check their driver’s license to make sure there is only one claim for food from each household.”

Kline is a Canadian citizen and not eligible to work in the United States. She wanted something to do with her time that would benefit the community, so she started volunteering at the food drop program six years ago. Today she is the coordinator of what she describes as a tight-knit group of six regular volunteers who show up monthly and help distribute a semi-truck of food to 300 families in just under three hours.

“We have a great group of volunteers that work together well to pull this off successfully each month,” Kline said.

When the drop is over, which is usually around 11 a.m., Stan Montague, from Tooele County Relief services, takes any leftover food to the Tooele County Food Bank.

“We work together,” said Sandoval, who also receives regular shipments from the Utah Food Bank. “We spread the word about the food drop to people that come in to the food bank and we work with the Utah Food Bank to receive donations from local grocers. Most of what the food drops distribute is large quantities of perishable items. If they brought that semi-truck full to the food bank we wouldn’t have a place to store it or be able to distribute it all before it went bad. The food drop at Deseret Peak works great to get the food in the hands of people that need it.”

Tim Gillie: tgillie@tooeletranscript.com