Sioux City, Iowa, Sept. 12, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The buzz around the hive is that record amounts of honey are being donated to community food providers across the U.S. How much honey? Over the past week alone, the Sioux Honey Co-op donated enough honey to cover an entire football field.
“It’s enough to drizzle over 220,672 pancakes, and this week we donated it to food providers in California and Idaho,” said Mark Mammen, President Emeritus at the Sioux City, Iowa-based Sioux Honey Co-op, which donated nearly 10,000 of their 12-ounce bottles of SUE BEE® honey.
The clover honey is part of Sioux Honey’s “Honey for Hope,” a nationwide effort by the 103-year-old co-op of American beekeepers to share the sweetness of their end-of-summer harvest.
“With September being National Honey Month, and with our largest harvest of the year, we’re sharing SUE BEE®honey by making donations to food banks and food pantries in communities near and around where our 175+ Sioux Honey beekeepers live,” Mammen said.
Donation partners
The first donation was made on Wednesday, Sept. 4, to the West Valley Food Pantry in Woodland Hills, Calif. And then on Tuesday, Sept. 10, a donation was made to the Idaho Foodbank in Meridian, Idaho. The donations were made in partnerships with Los Angeles-based Smart & Final, which operates 255 grocery stores in the western U.S., and WinCo Foods, a Boise, Idaho-based grocer with 126 locations in the Midwest and western U.S.
“Our community is fortunate to have businesses like WinCo and beekeepers who are part of the Sioux Honey Co-op – people who make it a mission to give back to the communities where they do business,” said Randy Ford, CEO at the Idaho Foodbank, which provides meals for an average of 213,000 people each month.
“Honey – along with items like mustard, ketchup, seasonings, those kinds of things – is prized at our food pantry. For people who are struggling with food insecurity having access to shelf-stable items like honey is extremely helpful,” said Debbie Decker, executive director at the West Valley Food Pantry.
Long shelf life and versatility make honey an especially ideal item for food pantries and food banks.
“It doesn’t need to be refrigerated; many people use it to help soothe a sore throat or tame a cough; it’s a great natural substitute for sugar in baking; and it has a substantial shelf life – honey is a super food,” added Mammen.
Indeed, honey is a superfood that lasts a long time. How long? They found a jar of honey in King Tut’s golden tomb that was still edible after 3,000 years. Of course, this donated honey won’t be on the shelf long at the West Valley Food Pantry or the Idaho Foodbank, and honey technically has a shelf life of 3 years.
“Honey moves extremely fast from our distribution warehouse – it’s a popular, in-demand item,” said Ford.
Beekeepers in our communities
Burley, Idaho-based beekeepers Joel Smith and Ryan Razee joined the co-op in 2017 when they purchased the Belliston Bros Apiaries, which had been a member of the Sioux Honey Co-op since 1970.
“‘Honey for Hope’ is the perfect name for this donation effort,” said Razee. “With the honey going to food banks and food pantries, we know that it can give people hope – one less food item to buy this month, and maybe that’s just enough hope to keep them going.”
Sioux Honey has committed to more honey donations in the coming months as the co-op continues to share sweetness.
“We’re going to keep donating as much honey as we can to local food pantries and food banks in communities in and around where our beekeeper and their families live,” added Sioux Honey’s Mammen. “And we’ll keep trying to sweeten lives, one bottle of SUE BEE® at a time.”
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