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A lot of area residents will be breaking bread tonight and in the days to come courtesy of Mrs. Baird’s Bread and the Food Bank of the Golden Crescent.

The local food bank received the first 1,000 of 5,000 loaves of bread and representatives of more than a dozen of its agencies were on hand Monday morning to gather the bounty.

“This is an important donation for us,” said Gertie Brown, director of Labor of Love in El Campo. “We give away food once a month and serve about 65 families in the El Campo area.”

Labor of Love is a program of the Pilgrims Rest Missionary Baptist Church.

The bread donations are part of Mrs. Baird’s “Pass the Bread” program and coincide with the company’s 100th anniversary. The program epitomizes company founder Ninnie Baird giving away bread to her neighbors in Fort Worth before she started selling bread.

“We are wanting to give back to our communities by passing the bread to those in need,” said Shane Sumrow, company spokesman. “Without our community support we wouldn’t have been around for 100 years.”

“Another thing that makes this program unique is that this is fresh bread,” he said. “This bread was baked on Saturday. Hopefully you can get it to your clients so they can have it on their tables tonight.”

Cindy Zamora, executive director of the Food Bank of the Golden Crescent, was thrilled with the donation.

“We traditionally do not receive a lot of donations of fresh bread,” Zamora said. “We are happy to help celebrate this important time with Mrs. Baird’s and glad it benefits the hungry in our communities.”

Lee Pipkin, director of food resources for the Texas Food Bank Network, and several members of the local food bank’s board of directors attended Monday’s brief ceremony and assisted with distribution.

The Food Bank of the Golden Crescent serves more than 100 agencies in 11 counties. Additional deliveries of 500 loaves of bread will come into the food bank each week until the 5,000 total has been reached.

During 2008, Mrs. Baird’s will donate about 500,000 loaves of bread to 25 food banks in the communities where the company’s products are sold in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Kansas and Missouri. Twenty of the food banks are in Texas.

Sonny Long is a reporter for the Victoria Advocate. He can be reached at 361-580-6585, by e-mail at slong@vicad.com, or comment on this story at VictoriaAdvocate.com.