Meals from the Heartland passed the one million mark for meals distributed to Iowa food banks and pantries on June 1st, which beat the record total of 952,000 meals for all of 2024.
Marketing Manager Daniel Rieck says it’s good that they can produce that many meals, but sobering that they need to. “It’s nice to see, but also it it’s eye opening as well to see that need increase this year compared to last year,” she says. Rieck says higher food prices have driven the increased need.
They get a big start on packaging meals in January and she says things tend to slow down in the summer. “We definitely need more volunteers come summer time, that’s just are slow point of the year,” Rieck says. “Our holiday season is super busy, that’s when we typically have fall time, with our annual hunger fight,” she says. The hunger fight is October 6th through the 11th and they have some 4,000 volunteers who help package two million meals. Those meals go out of the state.
The meals they make for Iowa are called the Taco Mac meal, with macaroni noodles, soy protein, taco seasoning and cheese inside the bag. “So we have about six servings in a bag,…so a bag could feed an entire family basically. It goes a long way. We’ve made test meals here in the office and had people who had just joined our team test it. And it makes a very large batch,” she says.
The meals they send internationally are called Hearty Pack. “Those servings are going to look a little differently compared to the local. That hearty pack meal, international countries will kind of add their own palatable additions to it, so they’ll add their own protein, you know, additional protein, vegetables that they get locally and stuff.
like that,” Rieck says.
To learn more about the organization of find out how you can volunteer, go to mealsfromtheheartland.org.