Kollas Orchard Volunteers Ready Apples for Foodshare Distribution

Monday morning, a group of nearly 20 hearty volunteers gathered to go apple picking, err, gleaning at the Kollas Orchard to benefit Foodshare.

What’s apple gleaning, you ask? It’s a time of year when volunteers visit local orchards and help sort through excess apples that will be donated to the greater Hartford charitable organization for distribution to those in need.

“David and Janet donate every year and we’re grateful for the donations,” Foodshare Transportation Manager Dom Piccini said Monday morning while taking a brief break from packing and sorting apples.

Concerned that there wouldn’t be enough volunteers at the orchard, Foodshare mobile site coordinator Kandi Victorino sent an email over this past weekend to members of her church, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Ellington, asking for help. As a way further promote the need for volunteer, Victorino posted an invitation to the greater community asking that residents get involved the initiative.

As it turned out, Monday morning’s group was one of the largest groups of volunteers to ever help out with the apple gleaning process at the orchard, according to several people who helped sort the apples and stack the empty cartons.

When asked what they thought of all the volunteers buzzing around their apple barn, David and Janet Kollas, the orchard’s owners, were humble in saying that they didn’t feel the need to publicize what they do at the end of the retail season.

“It’s just a very good arrangement, and we know that this extra fruit is not just going to waste. We’re happy with that,” David Kollas said taking a brief break to survey the work.

Over the course of 90 minutes, Piccini moved dozens of large apple bins on pallets from the apple barn floor to the back of his truck. Overall, the group collected about 17,000 pounds of fresh apples retrieved from cold storage, just enough to last the organization for one week’s worth of distribution, Piccini said.

Each day, two of Foodshare’s mobile distribution trucks, which can carry a gross weight of 32,000 pounds, deliver to food pantries and other organizations throughout the central and north central regions of the state.

Once the apples were delivered to the organization’s Hartford location they sorted again, this time into 2-pound bags for the organization’s mobile Foodshare customers.

Some of those apples might be distributed Thursday morning between 10-10:30 at the Ellington Mobile Foodshare site at the church at 2 Maple Road, Victorino said.

“I think because we do the mobile Foodshare site, and we see the gratitude that people have just for a bag of oranges or for things that they haven’t had for a log time,” Victorino said.

“Foodshare means a lot to us, we’re really coming to appreciate the program. That creates excitement for us to do something like this,” she added about the apple packing on Monday morning.

Here's a quick look at some of the numbers behind Foodshare's initaitives:

• Foodshare serves 128,000 of our hungry neighbors living in Greater Hartford.
• Foodshare distributes 16 tons of food per day.
• Foodshare has an extensive network of 3,685 dedicated volunteers.

For more information about Foodshare, visit its website.