If competitive meal-packing was an Olympic sport, you could safely assume that the folks at Medtronic would all earn the gold! In fact, you could also safely say that they essentially invented competitive meal packing – with help from Meals From The Heart, of course.

Now, this is how you kick off the summer packing season – with a little trip to the mountains. We even had a tent! We packed up the Meals From The Heart truck and headed to Louisville and Boulder, Colorado to pack meals from June 5-7 with Medtronic. The air may be a little thinner in Colorado, but hearts were full, hands were busy, and smiles were abundant! Between the two cities, 88 teams and 1,431 energized people packed nearly 340,000 meals! All the meals were donated to the local Community Food Share.

Just how far will Meals From The Heart go to help local, food insecure families? How about 4,173 miles! That’s how far it is from the Minneapolis airport to the Netherlands. And for the third year in a row, Meals From The Heart teamed up with Medtronic in the Netherlands to help support local food shelves.

A key part of Medtronic’s mission focuses on community service and partnership. They put a priority on setting aside time for their associates to serve their local communities. And this month, the local communities they served happened to be in the Netherlands – specifically, Kerkrade, Heerlen, Eindhoven, and Maastricht.

Last summer, we helped facilitate our first meal packing event at one of Medtronic’s offices in the Netherlands. This European event was our first outside of the U.S. and it went very well! Thank you to the nice folks at Medtronic for sponsoring it and volunteering at the event, we were able to pack thousands of meals for local food shelves in the Netherlands area.