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“We have really consumed a lot of volunteer time looking for peanut butter products.”
The food bank’s Betsy Ballard says there are two main reasons for that. First the food bank’s building of 78-thousand square feet is full of food that has to be checked for products containing peanut butter and secondly most of food is donated.
“And therefore we have little control over what’s brought into our receiving bay. Therefore we have to spend a lot of time digging through donated food to make sure the food is safe to be distributed.”
Peanut butter products are great for food banks because peanut butter is nutrient dense, a great source of protein and can be eaten as is.
It also has a long shelf life.
“The shelf life does work against us in some ways because we can have products sitting here for quite some time and that makes it even more challenging to ferret out anything that is on that recall list.”
Ballard says even worse is the fact that so much food has to be discarded.