Due to reduced demand for its onboard and Delta Sky Club offerings amid the Covid-19 outbreak, Delta has a lot of food that would have expired before it could be served to customers. This stockpile amounts to some 200,000 lbs of food, which the airline is donating to communities in need.
Delta is providing this food to hospitals, community food banks and other organisations around the world to support people in need, as well as those working on the front lines of the pandemic.
Both perishable and non-perishable goods are being donated, and Delta’s employee teams are engaging organisations that can immediately use the food. Efforts to identify and support organisations globally will be ongoing.
Delta has longstanding relationships with organisations like Feeding America, a nonprofit network that helps support numerous food banks and where employees help repack more than two million pounds of food annually. During the pandemic, local Feeding America organisations are distributing the donations to those in need.
In addition, Delta is working to help long-term food service partners, including Linton Hopkins, Newrest and Sodexo, with resources they need to serve their communities.
Here are some of the communities receiving Delta’s food donations:
- So far in 2020, Delta has donated over 200,000 pounds of perishable food items from warehouses to Feeding America partner agencies across the USA and other charities, including Georgia Food & Resource Center and Missouri’s Carthage Crisis Center.
- Regional managers are working with caterers to donate food where needed. In Nice, France, Delta partnered with local caterer, Newrest, to donate pre-packaged snacks to hospitals and healthcare workers. Additionally, food and coffee were donated to MIR, an organisation distributing free meals and providing shelter to the homeless and human trafficking survivors. Managers in New York are also doing their part by providing food donations to hospitals in their region.
- In Philadelphia, Delta partnered with SodexoMAGIC to donate over 500 pounds of food from the Delta Sky Club at the airport to a local Feeding America food bank.
- Delta Sky Clubs around the USA, including those in Los Angeles and at New York’s JFK and LaGuardia airports, have activated programmes similar to the one in Philadelphia, providing donations to first responders, local charities and churches.
- Delta is working with Linton Hopkins – an award-winning Atlanta chef and longtime Delta partner – to provide trays and packaging supplies to support food distribution with initiatives like ATLFAMILYMEAL, which delivers meals to Atlanta hospitality workers. Hopkins’ team is delivering over 5,000 meals per week, including to first responders at Atlanta’s Emory University Hospital.
- Delta employees are caring for their colleagues by sending fresh Flight Fuel boxed meals to Reservations and Customer Care centres to support the teams responding to unprecedented numbers of customers needing to make changes to their flights.
As well as donating food, in March Delta’s teams started providing free flights to medical professionals on the front lines of the Covid-19 crisis and began utilising Delta’s wholly owned aircraft interiors subsidiary, Delta Flight Products, to manufacture face shields to protect hospital workers.
