By Lorrie Baumann
What Mark Singleton wants to remember about 2020 is not the divisiveness of our election politics but the way Americans came together to help each other through a disaster of Biblical proportions. Not the damage unleashed by a tornado that ripped through Nashville, Tennessee on March 3, just as the storm clouds of the COVID-19 pandemic had already begun gathering over New York, but the American can-do that brought a community together to sing Nashville back afterwards. Not the hardships of feeding a country populated by people afraid to go into a grocery store, but the hard work by the truck drivers who crossed the miles to bring the food that stocked the shelves. And not the operational difficulties of running a food processing company through a pandemic but the determination and good cheer of workers in Rudolph Foods plants who kept coming to work to meet increasing demand for food products that would be loaded onto those trucks for delivery to grocers across the country. “We’ve been working harder than ever – I have never been this busy,” Singleton said. “In the midst of all that, you’re seeing, all over America, unbelievable things.”
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the first laboratory-confirmed case of COVID-19 in New York City was diagnosed on February 29, 2020. “The subsequent 3-month period was characterized by a rapid acceleration in the epidemic, resulting in approximately 203,000 cases and 18,600 deaths among persons with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19,” according to a CDC Morbidity and Mortality Report dated November 20, 2020.
In Singleton’s memory, though, the year of disasters really began, not with the first rumbles of American experience with a global pandemic, but with a tornado that ripped through Nashville in the early morning hours of March 3. The tornado was part of a storm cluster that ripped through central Tennessee, killing 24 people and wrecking hundreds of buildings. Tornadoes were reported several times across a 145-mile stretch of central Tennessee, and they wreaked devastation that deprived hundreds of people of their homes.
In response to the emergency, Southern Recipe Small Batch, a Rudolph Foods brand, organized a week-long series of virtual concerts featuring up-and-coming country music artists to raise funds for the Second Harvest Food Bank of Middle Tennessee and MusiCares, a non-profit organization that had formed a COVID-19 Relief Fund to help support the musicians whose livelihood had vanished because they were unable to tour during the pandemic. Five 30-minute concerts were performed in the living rooms of Ian Munsick, Carlton Anderson, Jordan Rager, Faren Rachels and Kasey Tyndall and streamed live through Southern Recipe Small Batch’s Instagram account. Southern Recipe Small Batch also donated $2,500 to each charity and offered giveaways to consumers who tuned in to watch. “The outreach effort and the response were unbelievable,” Singleton said. There’s just so many people out there trying to help right now. This thing has touched everybody.”
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“We’ve helped food banks here, military food banks there. We’re just looking for every opportunity,” he added. “It’s a privilege to be able to, and it’s just so important right now as we get through this thing together.”
Over the years, Rudolph Foods has actively celebrated the role that truckers play in connecting its products with its markets, and Singleton also serves as a board member for the St. Christopher Truckers Relief Fund. That put him in position to see the toll that the pandemic was taking on truck drivers over the course of the year. The St. Christopher Truckers Relief Fund is a non-faith-based charity that supports over-the-road truck drivers and their families with a variety of services excluding actual medical expenses to help them stay well and assists with essential household expenses when drivers aren’t able to work.
“We depend on trucks to move all of our stuff from one end to the other of our supply chain,” Singleton said. “This year, more than any year in our history – the people that have stopped truckers to say thanks, the people who have donated to our St. Christopher’s Fund – this has been our highest fundraising year ever, and that’s because people now understand that there are so many invisible people in their lives…. I think we’re going to come out of this thing with a much greater appreciation for the work that gets done in this country.”
Some of that invisible work is done by the workers in the Rudolph Foods plants, who’ve been stressed by the demands of their jobs even though the configuration of their plants allows for social distancing in a way that many other food processing plants do not, Singleton said. “I can’t think of any time in my 30 years in manufacturing that it’s been harder to operate from so many directions,” he said. “People are tired. This has been a slog… I am so convinced that if our customers knew how hard the people in our plant work to make the food taste great and to be safe, they’d pay us a lot more for it. How lucky we are to be able to find so many people who care so much – is simply remarkable.”