Delivering food to Mid-Ohio Food Collective’s agency partners is just one of many ways that Class B CDL Driver Mike Yeager has found to help his community from behind the wheel of a truck.
Since getting his driver’s license at age 16, he has delivered heavy machine parts to every corner of Ohio, tackled late-night ambulance runs as an EMT, and driven to emergency sites as a firetruck engineer. Now, he crosses Columbus daily to pick up bulk donations and deliver fresh food from the MOFC warehouse to local food pantries, soup kitchens, and feeding sites.
To Mike, a husband and father of three, delivering food is about more than getting loads from point A to point B. The job has helped him get to know Columbus and the people on his route in profound and sometimes surprising ways.
“After seven and a half years making mostly the same stops, you develop relationships,” Mike said. “I get to know the customers—what they need, how we can help, and what’s going on in their lives.”
As Ohio’s largest foodbank with a distribution area covering 20 counties, MOFC owns and operates a fleet of 17 box trucks and three semi-trucks. Early each morning, the Collective’s staff of 16 drivers set out (often before dawn) to supply the hundreds of MOFC partner agencies working to feed hungry Ohioans. In 2022, MOFC’s drivers logged more than 497,000 combined miles—enough to cross the continental U.S. more than 200 times.
Mike’s yearly portion of that total is typically spent in the greater Columbus metro area. Over the course of thousands of trips, he’s become a proud regular at some of the city’s best mom-and-pop restaurants and learned cooks and servers by name. And after years of deliveries, he’s picked up some tricks of the trade that make his truck a welcome sight to people on his route.
Staff at All People’s Market on Parsons Avenue in Columbus, for instance, credit Mike with the pantry’s layout. When he realized many of the location’s customers use wheelchairs and walkers, he suggested moving bins of food farther apart to make space. After talking it over with pantry staff, he used his truck’s pallet jack to put heavier products such as potatoes close to the pantry’s exit door. Now, customers don’t have to carry those items as far when shopping.
“With bananas, you’ve got to take off the plastic wrap that’s put on at the warehouse. The plastic protects the fruit on the truck, but the bananas will cook in their skins if you don’t let them breathe once they’re in the pantry,” Mike said during a recent delivery run. “I hate stuff going to waste just like I hate backtracking on roads. Less waste means more people get to take home fresh food.”
As he makes his rounds, agency staff greet him by name. As he drops pallets of produce and pantry goods, he asks after pantry managers’ families and shares news in turn. Those connections often turn into friendships and, when life happens, Mike is happy to lend an ear. At one point, a pantry manager on his route had a loved one live through a serious accident.
“He wasn’t sure she was going to make it, and he told me she was going in for emergency surgery,” Mike said. “But I was an EMT, so I was able to say, ‘Don’t worry, that’s a good thing! It means they think they can save her.’ It gave him some hope, and she ended up being OK.”
When asked whether he thought he’d have that kind of conversation as a truck driver for a foodbank, Mike laughed.
“No way!” he said. “But I was in the right place at the right time.”
The job has provided other surprising ways of helping people beyond delivering food locally. After Hurricane Maria swept through the Carribean and the Gulf of Mexico in 2017, Mike was one of a handful of MOFC drivers who made the trip to Central Texas to relieve his counterparts at the San Antonio Food Bank who’d been working for weeks without a break to help get food to affected areas.
Closer to home, Mike uses his commercial driving skills to help others off the clock, too. For several recent holiday seasons, he has volunteered to drive a rented truck of Thanksgiving turkeys to a distribution point for central Columbus’ Neighborhood Services Inc. Food Pantry. While the delivery isn’t an MOFC trip and Mike doesn’t get paid for the time, he said he doesn’t mind.
“I know the pantry manager. I help him out because that’s what you do,” Mike said matter-of-factly from behind the wheel of his MOFC delivery truck. “You help how you can, and I can drive.”
