Food distributor, Sysco, holds pop-up shopping event in Bonita Springs

Finding food during the pandemic is a challenge for some people in Southwest Florida, so one of the country’s largest food distributors showed up to help our community.

On Friday, Sysco, a food wholesaler, held a pop-up grocery store at the Southwest Florida Event Center in Bonita Springs, where people could buy groceries.

For four hours Friday afternoon, the line outside of the event center grew longer and longer.

The parking lot turned into a pop-up shop, selling things like vegetables, milk, and even the highly coveted toilet paper.

Customer Karl Mindel ordered ahead got the groceries he needed, saying, “This is safer than walking into the grocery store. They had large quantities of anything you wanted and it just seemed like the thing to do.”

Sysco has held similar pop up shops at different places across the country.

So when the food distributing company reached out to the event center, co-owner Jennifer Shanahan says she jumped at the opportunity to help the company and the community, “We wanted to be able to have a business use our facility to be able to help people in the community get food in a way that they feel comfortable getting food.”

This is the first pop up shop Sysco has held in Southwest Florida during the pandemic and Shanahan says if Sysco would like to come back and do another pop-up shop here, she would gladly lend the company the parking lot again.fpop