Toyota holds 15th annual Tundra Food Drive, benefitting Philabundance

PHILADELPHIA - Toyota held its 15th annual Tundra Food Drive Wednesday at Citizens Bank Park benefitting Philabundance.

Nearly 85 Tundra pickup trucks hauled pallets of food that will be donated to people suffering from food insecurity in the Philadelphia region.

"We started this 15 years ago with five trucks," said Paul Muller, President of them Tri-State Toyota Dealers Association. "To now this year we have 84 trucks, 340,000 pounds of food to make 230,000 meals."

Muller said one in seven families in the Philadelphia region, including one in three children, suffer from food insecurity.

"To think about a child going to bed hungry is heartbreaking, so whatever we can do to mitigate that we’re going to keep doing," said Muller.

Philabundance CEO Loree Jones-Brown said, "We have all the sports teams, all the media outlets, we have the associates from across this region coming out and what we love about that is we realize to fight hunger, it’s going to take partnership, collaboration and that’s what represented here today."

The "Haul Away Hunger" event took over Lot P next to Citizens Bank Park. Volunteers from various organizations volunteered by directing traffic, operating forklifts to lift the pallets of food and driving the Tundra trucks.

"I work at Del Toyota, so my manager asked me if I wanted to do this and I was like yeah sure," said Christian Chila. "I come from a family that has food so it’s nice to be a part of that we can give food out to people that don’t have food."

Each week Philabundance serves over 135,000 people, but the number of people facing food insecurity in our region is greater than 500,000 according to the nonprofit.

Toyota is a FOX 29 sponsor.