When COVID-19 arrived in Orlando in early 2020, a pastor asked Merrel Rozier, a KeHE driver living in South Florida, if he could pull together a few boxes of food for a community drive, specifically focused on their local international community. Three days later, Merrel arrived with six pallets. It's a clear example of how KeHE employees care for their communities by mobilizing resources around real needs.

Within weeks, that initial effort to serve grew to help more than 400 international hospitality workers and students who had been told to quickly vacate their apartments due to the pandemic. Because KeHE carries the international food products these workers and students ate—Asian, Middle Eastern, African, and Indian goods—they could provide the right food, not just any food. Recipients began sharing their boxes with neighbors. Other recipients started volunteering themselves.

What started as a crisis response turned into an ongoing partnership with Agape Source, an Orlando organization focused on serving international hospitality workers and students. Today, KeHE Cares continues to support Agape Source through grants and food donations, partnering with local international grocery stores to put the right ingredients and foods in the right hands.

By the Hand Club for Kids has walked alongside children in Chicago's most under-resourced neighborhoods since 2001, providing support from kindergarten through college across six locations in the city. When Dave Bogertman, a supply chain leader at KeHE's Naperville office, learned that his friend and fellow church member Peter Hansen led By the Hand's Moving Everest location, he saw an opportunity to bring KeHE into the classroom in a new way.

Two years ago, Dave helped launch a nine-week program introducing fourth graders to the world of supply chain: how muffins travel across the country, how ice cream gets from a factory to a freezer, how a brand like SkinnyPop finds its way onto a store shelf. More than 40 KeHE volunteers showed up, a different team every week, each bringing a different slice of the business to life for kids who had never seen themselves in that world. The program has grown every year since. This year, a different KeHE team is paired with every grade from fourth through eighth, and over the summer, By the Hand's students will spend a day at KeHE headquarters, going inside the company they've been learning about all year. For the students, it's a window into careers they never knew to dream about. For the KeHE teams who show up week after week, it's a reminder that the work they do every day reaches further than a warehouse or a spreadsheet.

Business can be a powerful force for good—in communities, in cultures, and in the lives of employees. That's the conviction behind the Goodness Collective, a movement of leaders and companies putting that idea into practice. KeHE Cares leaders helped launch the Collective last year and continue to shape it as founding members, contributing their time, insight, and collaborative vision. Built around four practices—Giving, Serving, Employee Care, and Leader Wholeness—it offers strategic Accelerator sessions where leaders envision, design, and build the future of their goodness programs. KeHE’s commitment to goodness is inspiring and supporting other organizations on their journey.

In 2025, that idea took a tangible step forward. The Inaugural Goodness Gathering brought together 35 leaders from organizations across the country who are asking the same questions: How do we build a giving and serving culture that actually lasts? How do we make this part of who we are, not just what we do?

A new podcast and online resource hub launched alongside the Gathering, extending the conversation beyond a single event and giving members a library of stories, tools, and perspective to carry back to their own organizations. Five companies also completed Goodness Accelerator sessions, receiving focused, hands-on support for building out their own serving and giving programs, inspired in no small part by the success of KeHE. Three of those companies have since launched serving programs of their own, sending employees to serve at many of the same partners KeHE Cares has worked alongside for years.

With plans to double both the Gathering and the Accelerator cohort in 2026, the Goodness Collective is no longer just an idea. It's a movement.

KeHE employees have served alongside Mission Lazarus for years—building, cooking, connecting with families in Honduras who are growing spiritually, learning actively, and earning sustainably. The partnership runs deep.

In 2025, KeHE Cares found a new way to invest in that relationship, not through a serving trip, but through training. Paul Reichert joined Mission Lazarus leaders at their annual leadership conference, spending a couple of days sharing actionable ideas about flourishing and being present with the people who pour themselves into this work day in and day out.

Change-making organizations are only as effective and sustainable as their leaders. That’s why KeHE Cares invests in those leaders and equips them for the long haul, ensuring that the impact can multiply long after any single trip or project wraps up.