The Cup comes home!

The competition was intense and spirited, but in the end the Hy-Vee Show Ponies (hey, don’t look at me, they named themselves) prevailed to take home the first Meals from the Heartland Hy-Vee Cup.

Meals from the Heartland is a non-profit organization that brings together individuals, businesses, schools, churches and organizations to package meals for distribution to hungry people throughout the world. On September 2-5, Meals from the Heartland is holding its annual mass packaging event at Hy-Vee Hall in downtown Des Moines, where an expected 15,000 volunteers will assemble 4 million meals to be sent to Haiti, Jamaica, several African nations and other areas with critical food needs.

Each meal package contains enough rice, soy flour, dried vegetables and vitamin powder to make a nutritious meal for a family of six. Volunteers work in assembly-line fashion, adding the dry ingredients to plastic bags which are then weighed, sealed and packed into cardboard boxes for shipping.

As a prelude to this weekend’s event, Hy-Vee sponsored the Hy-Vee Cup, a friendly competition between teams of businesses and other organizations supporting Meals from the Heartland. Twenty teams raced against each other to determine which team could package the most meals in 5 minutes. The four teams tallying the most meals packaged moved on to the final speed round, where the first team to pack a case (36 meals) was declared the winner.

As the sponsor of the Cup, Hy-Vee had three teams in the competition: the Show Ponies (don’t ask), a group of store directors from the Des Moines area; Team Wendel, captained by Senior Vice President of Marketing Jon Wendel; and Team Awesome, which — well, I guess that name is self-explanatory. The Show Ponies not only defeated their fellow Hy-Vee employees, they also raced past the other three teams in the speed round to claim the crystal Hy-Vee Cup.

The Cup is an opportunity to raise awareness of Meals from the Heartland and recognize the organizations that donate volunteers and resources to make the mass packaging event possible. Andy Garman, sports director of KCCI News Channel 8, served as emcee and interviewed Hy-Vee President Randy Edeker live during the 6 p.m. newscast.

Special thanks to all team members and volunteers who participated in the Cup, and to Hy-Vee Executive Vice President Ken Waller for spearheading the Hy-Vee effort. To learn more about Meals from the Heartland and how you can help, visit the organization’s website at www.mealsfromtheheartland.org. And check out our photo gallery from the event: