GONZALES — Taylor Farms distributed 161 backpacks to first-grade students at La Gloria School in honor of the first day of school on Aug. 10.
“Bruce’s (Taylor) mentality for Taylor is to help out the communities we are in,” Office Manager Chrissy Fink said. “Sam (Chaidez) came on board more than a year ago and he strongly supports Bruce’s philosophy of giving back to the community. We were approved to do the project and we did it.”
Chaidez is the director of operations who also came up with the idea to give gift bags to the first-grade teachers. Inside the gift bags were items from Taylor Farms as well as a $100 Walmart gift card to help the teachers purchase supplies.
“One of the teachers, when we presented the gifts to her, I thought she was going to cry,” Fink said. “It was a really good day.”
Taylor Farms partnered with Golden State Foods (GSF) to bring the backpacks to the first-graders. The Taylor Farm and GSF partnership is approximately six years old and began with bringing backpacks to students in Salinas. This year marks the first year that the Gonzales Taylor Farms Plant brought backpacks to Gonzales school children.
First-grade students were selected as the children to receive backpacks because of the Success by 6 campaign.
At 8:45 a.m. on Thursday morning, representatives from food safety, packaging, raw product, production, sample, shipping and receiving departments passed out the backpacks with paper, glue, crayons, markers, notebooks, scissors and pencils.
“We want to continually get more involved in this community because it’s a great little community,” Fink said. “It was such a great day. All our team members were just all smiles and happy to make a difference.”
