Leamington, ON & Delta, OH – During the 2018 holiday season, the NatureFresh™ Farms team was busy spreading good will by volunteering with local partners, spreading cheer at holiday events, helping deserving families, and donating food to feed people in need. Giving back to the communities they grow in is an integral part of the NatureFresh™ Farms identity!
NatureFresh™ Farms kicked off the season of giving by sending a group of volunteers to Southwestern Ontario Gleaners, a charitable organization in Leamington, ON that distributes nutritious food to people in need both locally and internationally. NatureFresh™ Farms regularly donates Bell Peppers to this organization so that they can create healthy soup mix bags for charitable distribution. In one volunteer session, the NatureFresh™ Farms team was able to prepare roughly 25,000 servings of soup!
Leamington’s Annual Christmas Parade, which took place on November 24th this year, presented the NatureFresh™ Farms team with an opportunity to spread holiday cheer in a community they have called home for twenty years. The team gave their Greenhouse Education Center trailer a festive makeover for the event, and Peter Quiring, Matt Quiring, John Ketler, and dozens of their NatureFresh™ Farms employees accompanied the float, wishing happy holidays to families watching the parade.
To help their neighbors have a happy holiday season, NatureFresh™ Farms also ran a Holiday Sweepstakes campaign in Fulton County, Ohio, calling members of the community to nominate five deserving families to receive a helping hand. Cornelius Neufeld, Operations Manager at NatureFresh™ Farms USA, explained how this initiative got started: “Our employees in Ohio really drove this initiative – a lot of them knew neighbors or friends who would benefit from a helping hand during the holidays. They came to us asking what NatureFresh™ could do to support their community – so that’s where it all began.” The families who are chosen will each receive $500 grocery gift cards and NatureFresh™ Farms food baskets – they should expect the delivery of their care packages before Christmas Day.
All year long, NatureFresh™ Farms feeds their communities with healthy, flavorful Tomatoes, Bell Peppers, and Cucumbers, but their team decided to take things a step further this year and run a cross-company food drive during the holidays. Collectively, they were able to gather 6,330 non-perishable food items for donation! Donations were made to The Salvation Army in Leamington, ON and The Open Door in Delta, OH, and they were made in Peter Quiring’s name – a gesture that he says was very humbling: “These donations were given in my name as a gift from my team – it was incredibly humbling to see how everyone was inspired to give back to people in need in our communities in such a meaningful way.”
One more initiative that NatureFresh™ Farms supported this holiday season was Talking Over Turkey. This Leamington-based initiative will bring hundreds of food boxes to families in need this holiday season throughout the Leamington, ON area. Through the donations of South Essex Fabricating, NatureFresh™ Farms, and NatureFresh™ Farms Sales, approximately 200 Leamington-based families will receive a healthy holiday food box.
Connecting with the communities they grow in is always a top priority at NatureFresh™ Farms, whether it’s the holiday season or not – as far as their team is concerned, year-round growing is just as important as year-round giving!
