Rochdale Walmart donates 36,000 kilos of canned items to Regina Meals Financial institution – Regina

By Frank C. Bonner Last updated Sep 22, 2021

An unfortunate situation has turned into a good deed, benefiting a local non-for-profit.

Regina’s Rochdale Walmart temporarily closed its doors last month following a fire.

This week, the company decided they were in a position to give back. Walmart donated 36,000 pounds of canned goods to the Regina Food Bank.

It’s a welcome donation, especially at this time of year.

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“The need doesn’t stop once we ring in the New Year. Donations start to slow down…so having a big windfall and surplus of supplies we weren’t expecting to have is really important to us,” said John Bailey, Regina Food Bank CEO.

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To have Walmart step in at a time of need is something Bailey said goes a long way.

“They phoned us up and checked if we could handle it and process it and we gratefully said yes and worked through some of the details,” Bailey said.

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For Walmart, the food was still good, but they weren’t going to be able to shelve it by the time they get back up and running.

They thought the food bank could move it much quicker.

“Right now, we have gone through about half of it. We put it to use pretty quickly once we did our visual inspections to make sure it was safe for distribution,” Bailey said.

Rochdale Walmart is expected to reopen in the next couple of weeks.