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Sandra Mullen’s Chicks with Cans collected the most food with more than 20,000 pounds.

Last year, Sandra Mullen’s Chicks with Cans team won the Team Feed Flagler competition by collecting 4,000 pounds of food. But entering into the competition’s second year, the race heated up, and Mullen knew her group would have to step up its game to retain the trophy.

But Chicks with Cans didn’t just beat its 2010 collection record, it ground it into smithereens.

Winning for the second consecutive year, this time against 20 teams instead of about 10, Chicks with Cans exceeded its goal of collecting 20,000 pounds of food this year, which was at least double that of the Sheriff’s Office, which won runner-up for food collection.

To ensure a victory, the team “mastered the art of couponing,” as County Commissioner Milissa Holland put it.

“We knew that people were trying to dethrone us,” Mullen said. “We had to step it up this year. … The vultures came out of the woodwork.”

Mullen, who calls herself “extremely competitive,” said that her team doubled its days spent in front of local Publix stores to collect food. It put 30 pink collection tubs around Flagler, and offered incentives to the business with the largest haul.

It used award money (including Mullen’s Woman of the Year winnings from last year) to buy food from the Second Harvest Food Bank, at 16 cents per pound.

And it played the coupon game. Led by Women’s Initiative incoming president Donna Murray, Chicks with Cans went coupon crazy, stacking circular buy-one- get-one deals with cutouts to maximize its loot.

With $725 collected outside of Publix, Mullen and her team purchased $1,400 worth of groceries.

Everything the group used was also donated, from worker time, to storage space at Eagles Nest Storage, to a moving truck from Hargrove Mini Storage, which was used to transport two full loads of grub to the Flagler County Airport.

It seemed that everyone stepped up to help, Mullen said. Florida Hospital Flagler employees separately collected and donated more than 2,350 pounds of food for the drive.

Chicks with Cans is a subgroup of the United Way’s Flagler Women’s Initiative. About 20 members collaborated in this fundraiser, but another 20 from outside of the group also donated time and effort.

“Everyone wants the pink T-shirt,” Mullen said.

When all of Team Feed Flagler’s collected food was spread out for packaging in the airport hangar, Mullen said she realized that about 80% of it came from Chicks with Cans.

“Flagler County is going to eat well for a while,” she said. “ ... Now the only problem is, where do we go from here?”

Contact Mike Cavaliere at mike@palmcoastobserver.com.

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