By Alyse Horn

In synch with the holiday spirit, Northside Common Ministries Community Food Pantry is working with Whole Foods Market in Wexford to collect food donations as part of its “Feed Four More” campaign.

A $10 donation by shoppers purchases a bag of food that will be given to the Ministries food pantry and then distributed over 1,000 families and individuals who use the pantry each month.

Essentially, the bag is filled with enough food to feed a family of four.

Director of Northside Common Ministries Jay Poliziani said the food drive started on December 1, but he knows it’s going to be a great success because this drive is already doing much better than last years.

“It comes at the perfect time, because around Christmas people are amazingly generous,” Poliziani said.

Marketing Team Leader Annie Nelson said that the company does a drive like this every year and that all Whole Foods locations select a local nonprofit recipient, the past two years the Wholes Foods in Wexford has chosen Northside Common Ministries.

Nelson echoed Poliziani in saying that so far the drive is doing very well and she expects a large number of meals to be donated by the end of the month.

The types of food included in the meals are pasta, marinara sauce, vegetable soup, canned beets and apple sauce.

Nelson said that Whole Foods will order the donated food in bulk and then the food pantry will come pick it up to distribute to the families in need.

“As a company, [helping our community] is just something we do,” Nelson said.

The “Feed Four More” campaign will run until December 31.