The Calgary Interfaith Foodbank is giving a big shout out to the Church of Later Day Saints.

Over a 13 hour period earlier this month — specifically September 8th — almost 525,000 pounds of food was collected during a city-wide food drive.

“They plan this event every year,” the Foodbank’s Kathryn Sim tells 660News. “We work with them, definitely in terms of logistics and marketing.  But the 7,000 to 10,000 volunteers who are helping on the day of are all through the Church of Latter Day Saints.”

Sim says the food drive by the church helps fills the shelves during a critical time of the year, when the kids are heading back to school and demand rises.

“Our job now is to help those families and those individuals get through this kind of tricky time of year,” she adds.  “And then we’ll hit November and December where there will be another couple of major food drives on the horizon for us which will then help us get through the kind of January to March period.”

The more than half-million pounds of food collected by LDS members didn’t make it into the Guiness Book of World Records.  But it is worth about $1.5 million and it’s more than they were able to collect a year ago.

“Because when we ask Calgarians to step up — and our intention was, I guess what was driving us initially was we wanted to regain the Guiness World Record and we did not do that — but I can tell you that we collected more than 100,000 more than we did last year during this 13 hour period,” adds Sim.  “And that is incredible.”

Last year the Interfaith Foodbank helped out 147,000 people with food hampers.