'What a great opportunity to give': Couple donates shopping spree haul

Extended: Alberta man grabs groceries in prize spree Ryan Warren and Chantal Leroux won a shopping spree at a small Alberta grocery store and decided to use it to benefit the Calgary Food Bank.

A Bragg Creek couple who won a grocery shopping spree at their community's supermarket have donated everything they collected to the Calgary Food Bank.

Ryan Warren and Chantal Leroux won the spree in a contest held by The Grocery People, the group that administers Bragg Creek Foods, a locally-owned grocery store in the community south of Calgary, on June 10.

The prize gives them just under a minute to grab all they can from the store. Whatever they grab, they keep.

"I immediatley imagined grabbing all sorts of things for my own cupboard," Leroux said. "[But] after I reflected a couple of seconds later, I thought: 'What a great opportunity to give.'"

Just before 8 a.m. Saturday, staff at Bragg Creek Foods counted down, and Warren started racing around the store.

His first stop: diapers and baby food.

The couple says they'd been in contact with the Food Bank to find out what was most needed.

"A couple of days ago, we did a little walk through and tried to figure out our game plan,” said Warren. "We knew we had to go non-perishable, so we could kind of 'X' the meat aisle off our list. We were going for vegetables, tomato paste, coffee grinds; that sort of thing."

After a frantic 50 seconds of running through the aisles, Warren managed to snag $593.58 worth of grocery items for the Food Bank.

"A $500 donation – you think it’s not much – but it‘s going to go a long way," says Avaleen Streeton, a development coordinator with the Calgary Food Bank.

"There’s a lot of people that are going to have diapers, pasta and coffee and that wouldn’t have happened if these people hadn’t been so incredibly generous."

Originally, the contest was capped at $500 maximum, but The Grocery People agreed to cover the extra $93.58.

Warren, who owns Best West Window Tinting, also approached three car dealerships he works with for donations.

Porsche Calgary, Southcentre Volkswagen and Glenmore Audi each put in $500, allowing Warren to present the Food Bank with an additional $1,500.