Customers and employees of Randalls stores in Houston and Austin contributed $151,168 to relief efforts for victims of the Memorial Day weekend flooding during a fundraising campaign that launched the day after the holiday and ran through June 7.
The Randalls Foundation also made a matching gift of $100,000, which pushed the total donation to more than a quarter-million dollars in support of American Red Cross Disaster Relief. Campaign partners vital to alerting their viewers of the fundraiser were KHOU-TV in Houston and KEYE-TV in Austin.
“We all saw, lived through and some were personally touched by the historic flooding in Houston and the devastating flooding in central Texas,” said Randalls President Sidney Hopper. “Once again, our customers and employees showed us that they felt strongly called to help their neighbors in need and Randalls made it easy for them to do so by simply adding a donation to their grocery total at checkout.”
Randalls also responded to the immediate need for food and water by sending a truckload of water and snacks to the San Marcos Field Kitchen located at First Baptist Church in San Marcos. American Red Cross officials said the San Marcos area was the most impacted. The Red Cross had four shelters operating there and deployed 15 of 23 of its emergency vehicles stationed in and near San Marcos.
Randalls also sent a truckload of ice to Houston’s Red Cross Field Kitchen located at Braeburn Valley Baptist Church, where the truck remained on site to house the ice and other perishable food items. An additional truck with ice was sent to the American Red Cross headquarters in Houston, where it remained for nearly two weeks.
“Red Cross staff and volunteers are typically the first to arrive at the scene of a disaster, lending a helping hand and providing essentials, and they’re usually the last to leave,” Hopper said. “ They are the experts in disaster relief.”
Randalls Food & Pharmacy currently operates 44 stores in Houston and Austin under the Randalls banner and an additional 19 Albertsons banner stores in Louisiana and Florida. It is a division of AB Acquisition LLC, which operates the Albertson’s LLC, New Albertsons Inc. and Safeway family of stores. The company is privately owned by a consortium led by Cerberus Capital Management.
