04/13/2026
Since 2013, Matthew 25:35 Food Pantry in Destrehan has shown up every Wednesday for neighbors in St. Charles Parish. More than 400,000 pounds of food a year. Over 125,000 pounds of that recovered straight from retail shelves, fresh, perishable, the stuff people actually need.
But recovering fresh food is only half the work. You still have to move it, store it, and get it out the door before it's gone.
A Walmart Foundation grant recently helped Mary Anne and her team do exactly that, with a new reach-in refrigerator, a reach-in freezer, and a high-lift pallet jack. Before the pallet jack, volunteers unloaded trucks one box at a time. Now one person pulls a full pallet off. "This not only saves us time," Mary Anne said, "but since we are mostly women in the retirement age group, it also saves a lot of our energy."
The cold storage opened up something else too. "We can now store all of the extra perishable food that we pick up from Walmart and other retailers. This allows us to gift things to our clients that we could not always do before now."
And when disaster hits, the pantry's ready. No rented forklifts. No scrambling for equipment. Just the team, doing the job.
Marcus Vise, Second Harvest's coordinator for St. Charles Parish, put it plainly: "The volunteer hours saved don't only mean less strain. These saved hours translate directly into more pickups and more food recovered."
More food. Less strain. Every Wednesday, without fail.
During Fight Hunger. Spark Change., stories like this show how community support helps pantry partners across South Louisiana bring more meals home. You can support that work by making a gift to Second Harvest.
