An organizer of this past weekend's June 27th Miracle estimates at least one million pounds of non-perishable food and toiletries were collected Saturday.
Adam Lally was on Country Mornings with Morgan and said they would be counting and weighing the donations for days to come.
In May, a similar food drive called the May 16th Miracle in Chatham-Kent collected over 668,000 pounds of non-perishable food. Had the event been certified by Guinness World Records, it would have smashed the previous record set by the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics in 2011. It collected 559,885 pounds in a single day.
Lally is confident Saturday's event beat even Chatham-Kent's record.
"I think there's that much food just at the WFCU Centre," he said. "And there are nine or ten other arenas full of food across the county, so if that gives you any idea, I think we'll be talking million or millions."
(Photo by Darrin Drouillard)
Despite the event's success in Chatham-Kent, Lally still did not expect the number of donations.
"Likely should have known better, how much people would step up," he laughed. "We were working way harder and way longer than we thought, just everyone walking around, jaws on the floor all day. It just kept coming and coming and coming."
Around 3:30 p.m., two fully-loaded trucks from Champion Products were turned away because there was no room for it. Those trucks will return to the WFCU Centre Monday to drop off $40,000 worth of donations.
There may still be some households where donations were not picked up, and Lally said the organization is working to collect them. He recommended those homeowners go to their webpage and click on "Did we miss you" at the top of the page.
A final total is expected in the coming days.
