Yep. The food bank where I donate serves that community and that’s exactly why I chose them.
A good friend of mine delivers for Meals on Wheels in town. Anyone can sign up. While you never know anyone’s situation, he thinks that a couple of the clients are just lazy old dudes who want free meals that they can easily afford.
So, a neighborhood group just posted to Facebook that someone had donated a lot of frozen chicken and would be giving it out at a location until it ran out. My neighbor and cousin went, and what they were giving out were 50 pound boxes, deep-frozen into a single block. Best by October 2025, but probably been frozen ever since they were packed. She’s splitting it with me and her brother, but it’ll be overnight at least until the block thaws enough to pull apart the individual chickens (and see if they are still good).
Fifty pounds to each recipient? That’s a lot. I wonder how many will be able to use that much, versus it ending up in the garbage.
Yes. They had several dozen boxes. Probably literally a ton of chicken. That’s a crazy amount per person, but I can’t blame the volunteers for not wanting to thaw it all and portion it out.
I just wonder what the story is of a business misestimating their chicken needs by that much.
The church i visited when i was checking on food resources for the homeless in our county had 50# bags of onions and potatoes. More reasonable than 50# of frozen chicken, sure, but still hard to use up before it goes bad.
Something like that would be MUCH easier to share than frozen-solid chickens.
True, a homeless camp could likely use one up. But they werent just for the homeless, also anyone who needed them. Right there, shelves of day old bread and big bags of taters and onions, free for the taking. The priest even insisted I take home a bag of the bread as it often goes bad before grabbed. I made a modest donation, of course.
Those rotisserie birds are ~4 lbs each. So a ton is ~500 birds. A restaurant or grocery store that does a lot of rotisserie chicken might move WAG 100 birds a day. So that’s less than a week’s worth for one store.
Because of the sell-by dates I’m betting somebody somewhere flunked stock rotation and a pallet of birds got forgotten in the back of a freezer someplace. Once noticed they were too old to cook and serve per corporate policy. Donation time.
That’s all surmise & guesswork and worth every penny you’ve paid for it.
If they’re iin good shape to start with and you’ve got good storage, potatoes and onions will keep quite a while. However, most people don’t have the right storage, especially for the potatoes.
I know you’re not really supposed to refrigerate potatoes, but I always have, and I’m glad I do because I’ve heard WAAAAAY too many horror stories about spoiled potatoes. I also refrigerate onions, although those don’t last very long either even though it’s just me.
If you refrigerate potatoes, it changed the flavor and texture. Starches convert to sugars at low temperatures in potatoes.
Onions should keep quite a while in the fridge. Maybe you’re getting onions already near the end of their storage life. Or maybe you’re not getting storage varieties — some varieties of onions keep much longer than others.
When I said onions don’t last very long, I meant that I use them quickly.
Ah. Thanks for explanation; I’d misunderstood you.
I find both onions and potatoes keep for weeks at room temperature. The biggest issue is that’s they sometimes sprout, especially at this time of year, when they think it’s spring.
The box I mentioned turned out to have 10 whole (cleaned for rotisserie) chickens.
That’s a lot of chicken to use up quickly!
One a week for 10 weeks. They’re frozen.
For a single guy like @Darren_Garrison that might be work. For a poor family w several kids, might be easy to get through 2 chickens per meal feeding the whole family.
I would think storage of that many frozen chickens would be an issue for most people. Few people will have enough space in their freezer. That many chickens would be good for people who have food trucks. They could probably go through them in a day or so.
Probably lots of people will end up sharing them out with others like my cousin.
Now you just need a fryer and 2.5 Cokes.