Keller Families Partner with Southlake Central Market to Feed Neighbors in Need
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by
Leslie Horn
How a Bag of Halloween Candy Turned into Over 2 Million Dollars’ Worth of Food for the Homeless
Featured Photo: Gina Henderson, Hannah Groft, and other members of the Community Table team. Photo by Nate Henderson
Since 2018, families from the Keller congregations of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have been collecting unsold bread from the bakery at Central Market in Southlake five to seven nights a week and delivering it to people in need.
“It all started with a bag of Halloween candy, actually,” says Kory Booher, the organizer of the years-long project. “I couldn’t bear to watch my daughter eat a whole bag of candy, so she and I negotiated a deal, and I bought the candy from her. I meant to throw it away, but as I walked to my trash can, I thought, ‘I can’t just throw away perfectly good food, even if it is junk food!’ I called the Presbyterian Night Shelter in Fort Worth and spoke to a wonderful woman named Harriet, who was happy to take the candy off my hands. This started a weekly tradition for my family. We visited the shelter campus every Sunday, sometimes serving the moms and kids in the family shelter, sometimes visiting with and bringing needed items to the homeless veterans in the Patriot House.”
Sometime later, Kory’s husband, Brent, was at a neighborhood party and met a woman who was a baker at the Central Market store in Southlake. When asked what she does with the leftover baked goods every day, she said a different charity picks it up each night, except for Saturdays; they couldn’t find anyone to pick up Saturdays—they were throwing all the unsold bread away. Thinking of the homeless community in Fort Worth, Brent spoke up and said, “I can take it Saturday nights, tell me more!”
Sunday mornings at 5 am, Brent would arrive at Central Market and fill the entire back of his truck with around $3,000 of “shrink bread,” the unsold baked goods, including pies, cakes, cookies, and more. Later that day, the family would deliver the truckload to the veterans, Presbyterian Night Shelter, and Union Gospel Mission. This was their Sunday activity for a couple of years, and when they couldn’t go, others from their Keller congregation would take it instead.
Soon, the Boohers learned that the group that picked up Tuesday’s bread was no longer coming, so a few other friends decided to take that shift. For a couple of years, it worked like clockwork. On Sundays and Tuesdays, the families picked up the bread and delivered it to those in need. Then, COVID hit. When restaurants shut down, there was a surplus of food donated to food pantries. Central Market had no idea what shoppers’ buying patterns were going to be. “For a full week, none of the charities picked up the shrink bread except this little group of families on Sunday and Tuesday, which meant that while people were unemployed and going hungry, this store was throwing out between thousands of dollars’ of baked goods the other nights. Nora Judge, the head baker, called my husband and asked if we could pick it up every day. We said, ‘of course,’” explains Kory.
Brent would pick up the bread every morning, and Kory would spend the day calling shelters and food banks to figure out who could take it that day. Kory says, “We had to develop a grassroots-type effort to ensure we could get it distributed to those in need daily. We connected with Caryn Pierce, a local high school teacher who had a network of families in need she could tap into, Tongan Community Outreach in Euless, the Liberian Community Association, a refugee assistance group, and a variety of smaller charities who could only take a portion of the truckload of bread.
“We engaged the help of friends and others to pick up the bread and deliver—it was our daily jigsaw puzzle! There were so many little miracles: families that didn’t have a birthday cake for their kids had cakes magically appear on that day. People who needed specialty bread for Easter suddenly had just what they needed. God’s hand-led our scrappy group of volunteers to deliver truckloads of baked goods every day.”
In 2020, the group connected with Mission Arlington, which now receives the bread twice a week. This community center, located in the heart of Arlington, supports a large network of smaller charities. They take food directly to families living below the poverty line. “The first time we drove up with the bread, the women in the parking lot raised their hands and shouted, ‘Praise the Lord!’ With the volume of mouths they have to feed, this load of bread is a consistent blessing for their organization,” explains Brent. “The Bread Brigade,” as they have come to be known, also now delivers to Community Table and the Roanoke Food Pantry, as well as several senior living centers and Baylor Health Nurses and Staff.
Nora continues, “We put this plan together, and Brent started rounding up people. It really worked out well! Now, the families come at 10:00 every single night and help us bag the unsold bread, then we help them load it up into their cars out front. It’s so much help for us, and we feel so good knowing the bread is being eaten and not discarded. So many people are in need, and our team is proud to be able to help.”
“Sometimes things come up Monday nights that make bread pick-up difficult, but the driving force of love and community pushes us through!”
Nate Henderson
Christine Hickson’s family has been part of The Bread Brigade for years now. “Being part of this effort has helped our family really learn to love helping others. It’s a motivation to try hard to be better every day. I’m so thankful we’ve had the opportunity to help,” said Christine.
The Saunders family picks up the bread a couple of times a month with their teenage sons. “The bread runs have afforded me precious time with my middle son. He’s 15 and doesn’t talk much, but on these bread delivery missions, he opens up and shares his heart with me,” says Rachel Saunders. “We usually start out Saturday night not wanting to go, but by the time we finish the delivery on Sunday, we are happy and excited about our next trip to Arlington!”
“When I look back on all the bread we used to throw away before this partnership started, it breaks my heart. It was awful to throw so much away!” Nora Judge continued. “There’s a couple of times when something has happened, and the family can’t come, so I get on the phone and call one of the other families. They always work it out.”
Gina Henderson delivers the bread weekly to Community Table or the Roanoke Food Pantry with her husband, Nate, and their teenage daughter, Kelli. Gina says, “We have become friends with Hannah Groft and her team at Community Table through weekly bread deliveries, which has opened up opportunities for us to volunteer there as well. I remember an early morning panicked text from her during the ice storm in 2021 asking for help. Her other donations had fallen through due to the demand and travel challenges. We were able to secure a large food donation for her food pantry from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. During the storm, Nora called saying they had over 30 shopping carts of bread (a normal night yields 8-12), so we rallied several friends with 4WD vehicles to pick up and distribute to libraries that were being used as shelters, fire, and police stations, and many assisted living facilities. After delivering for two straight days and noticing that gas stations had run out of fuel, I worried that I was down to a 1/4 tank. But we were blessed with an endless tank that month!”
“Sometimes things come up Monday nights that make bread pick-up difficult, but the driving force of love and community pushes us through!” Nate Henderson adds.
“When COVID hit, it was such a shock,” says Nora. “It was so hard to see so many stores closed down. At the bakery before COVID, we knew people. We had relationships with our customers and could help them with bread pairings and recipe ideas. We don’t have that anymore. That moment is gone. Now it’s mostly InstaCart shoppers; it’s different. Being part of this community of local helpers has really cheered my heart. It makes me proud that we can help people.”
While it’s easier to give to organized charities in bulk, the impact of permitting citizens to be Central Market’s ambassadors and distribute the food to those in need is having a rippling effect far beyond putting food in empty bellies. Over the past five years, this effort has enabled youth to serve, families to get to know homeless communities, and teens to talk to homeless veterans to better understand homelessness and stop judgment. It has allowed neighbors to build friendships and proven that we can all do small things that have a big impact. Brent and Kory are so thankful that Nora and her team have partnered with the group for so long. “They’ve allowed people to gain the self-worth that comes only with serving others. It has built a feeling of community among the families doing the pick-up and deliveries, the employees of Central Market, and the charities. It has provided an intangible and unquantifiable feeling of unity that we all so desperately crave at this time,” Brent says.
Kory explains, “The blessings our family has received from that bag of Halloween candy cannot be counted. We started this journey selfishly—I wanted our life to have more meaning—and we continued it selfishly, because of the immense joy we felt when we served.”
Nora concluded, “it’s so funny because the families come in to pick up bread and are thanking me, but really, they don’t understand how much they are my angels. It’s easy for me to make a phone call or bag up bread, but they come in all kinds of weather, and they take it. That’s a big deal to me!”
The Boohers and the new managers of the Bread Brigade, Scott and Cecily Burk of Keller, estimate over the past five years, the partnership with Central Market Southlake has allowed well over $2 million of baked goods to be distributed to people in need in the DFW Metroplex. The outreach is ongoing. Each night, even now, four years later, one of the families listed below is at Central Market just before closing time to bag up, cart out, load up, and deliver bread:
David and Gillian Ashton; Michael, Stephanie, and Dante Ballantyne; Brent, Kory, Samantha, and Stryker Booher; Scott, Cecily, Benjamin, Tyler, and Reagan Burk; Christa, Greg, Caren, Mary, and James Cox; Jason, Sarah, Peter, Holly, and William Gasper; Richard, Marla, and Matthew Goode; Nathan, Gina, Connor, and Kelli Henderson; Andy, Chris, Haley, Cash, Gavin, and Tucker Hickson; Leslie, Neal, Parker, and Miles Horn; Ben, Jill, and Betty Martin; Ryan, Laurie, and Jonathan Murry; Caryn and Lance Pierce; Emilia Rabe; Josh, Annie, Aleah, Blake, Connor, Gemma, and Talya Salazar; Aaron, Rachel, Cameron, Jared, and Benjamin Saunders; Nate, Lauren, Liliana, Simon, Roman, and Natalia Wright.
This story has been published in LDS Living.
Leslie Horn is a writer, editor, fashion stylist, and Media Specialist living with her husband and teenage son in the Colleyville Texas Stake of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She has two children in college out of state.
