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Chattanooga: Sodexo helps feed children during summer

By: Clint Cooper
(Contact)

Included in this article

Susan Lyon

When food supplies to the Chattanooga Area Food Bank’s Kids Cafe run low in the summer, young children who rely on the program don’t go hungry.

National food service company Sodexo through its partners of BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee and Erlanger hospital step in to provide weekday lunches to children at various organization sites.

“It’s a very big help, especially during the summer,” said Evan Shepard, children’s program assistant at the Chattanooga Food Bank. “A lot less food comes in during the summer.”

The Sodexo Foundation’s Feeding Our Future program is supplying 12,000 meals over nine weeks this summer at the Boys and Girls Club in Alton Park, East Lake and Harriet Tubman, and over six weeks at Inner City Ministry, an outreach of First-Centenary United Methodist Church.

Last summer, in the first year of the program in Chattanooga, Sodexo, which serves area Blue Cross Blue Shield offices, provided 10,000 meals. Nationwide, the 11-year-old Feeding Our Future program provided 375,000 meals at 50 sites last year.

Susan Lyon of Sodexo (at BlueCross BlueShield) said the mission of the program is to assist relief organizations in helping feed children who are out of school and might otherwise go hungry.

The daily fare might include pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, ham and cheese sandwiches or fried chicken, apples and milk or juice, she said.

“We try to provide nutritional meals for them,” Ms. Lyon said.

The food is assembled separately from the other food prepared daily for BlueCross BlueShield.

“We order the groceries, and we pay the bills,” Ms. Lyon said.

She said the corporation’s local food cost this year for the program — labor is donated — is around $30,000. Last year, the cost was about $23,000, she said.

Karen Fletcher, director of inner city ministries at First-Centenary United Methodist Church, said the two days of lunches the program receives per week help make up for the loss of the USDA food program that had provided lunches for many years.

“We didn’t know where we were going to feed our kids,” she said.

The lunches were arranged through contact with the Chattanooga Area Food Bank, she said. Lunches are provided the rest of the week by church members or by financial donations that allow food to be purchased, Ms. Fletcher said.

She said the children always look forward to the variety of food they receive from Sodexo.

“They’re always excited about it,” Ms. Fletcher said. “The food is freshly prepared. It’s been great.”

Sodexo at Erlanger, meanwhile, supplies food once a week through its Stop Hunger program for children at Northside Neighborhood House.

Melissa Krell, production manager for Sodexo at Erlanger, said the company feeds 36 children after school from August through May and prepares lunch for 45 children during the summer.

She said the program had been in place for about five years.

Baylor School and Girls Preparatory School supply a good bit of food for the food bank’s Kids Cafe program, which feeds 400 children during the school year, but can’t do so during the summer when students are out, Mr. Shepard said.

Additional food for area summer programs comes through the agency’s Second Helpings program, he said.

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