SCRANTON, LACKAWANNA CO. (WOLF) \u2014 Just weeks after officially opening the doors to its new headquarters on Cherry Street in Scranton, the kitchen freezer at Meals on Wheels NEPA malfunctioned last Friday.<\/p>\n
\u201cAbout 10,000 pounds of product were at risk of spoiling. That includes about three to four thousand frozen meals that we keep in stock at a time,\u201d Bella Ceccoli, Director of Development at Meals on Wheels NEPA, said.<\/p>\n
Because of that, 90% of the meals were moved by staff, board members and volunteers on Friday morning from the Freezer to a refrigerated semi-truck until technicians came and fixed the issue on Sunday.<\/p>\n
This morning, staff members and volunteers at the Scranton location spent several hours unloading the truck and transporting the meals back to the now-working freezer.<\/p>\n
While 90% of the frozen meals were able to be saved, Ceccoli said the other 10% of their inventory had gone to waste, resulting in around $3,000 in losses.<\/p>\n
Since the organization primarily relies on grants, fundraising and donations to keep NEPA families fed, that 10% loss of inventory could impact how many meals they distribute.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a lot of money for us to lose in one go and that can be very detrimental to the agency,\u201d Ceccoli said.<\/p>\n
Now, Ceccoli and Meals on Wheels are calling on donations from the local NEPA community to help assist with regaining the funds lost from the spoiled products.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey can do so on our Facebook posts that we have circulating that everybody has been giving us a lot of love on and on our website at MealsOnWheelsAtNEPA.org,\u201d Ceccoli said.<\/p>\n
Despite the mechanical error, Ceccoli credits the resilience of both the staff and the response from all the folks reaching out to volunteer, so no one is left hungry in Northeastern PA.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s been amazing to see that resilience and that community come together in times like this,\u201d Ceccoli said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SCRANTON, LACKAWANNA CO. (WOLF) \u2014 Just weeks after officially opening the doors to its new headquarters on Cherry…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":281767,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[178,180,179],"class_list":["post-281766","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-scranton","tag-scranton","tag-scranton-headlines","tag-scranton-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281766","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281766"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/281766\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/281767"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=281766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=281766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}