Food fight in Merrimack

Fidelity teams compete to pack 50,000 meals for the New Hampshire Food Bank

Employees at Fidelity Investments in Merrimack are used to working in teams, but usually there’s someone at the helm.

Sometimes you can get along fine without one. A winning team preparing meals for the New Hampshire Food Bank in June found they just needed everyone pulling together.

“We collaborated like a team,” said James Cassell, a senior product manager whose group clocked in first before a rival team. “We just were a liquid, and we just moved as the tasks needed us to.”

To make meals for the New Hampshire Food Bank, Fidelity volunteers needed to wear aprons, hairnets, facemasks and latex gloves. They arranged themselves in assembly lines, with workers assigned to add the individual ingredients, including soy protein powder, needed to make a dry mix of minestrone soup that was then weighed and bagged.

Each team packed the equivalent of 1,050 meals, enough to fill five boxes. Volunteers worked in shifts in Fidelity’s two primary office buildings on its 544-acre campus, which employs 7,900 workers. By the end of the day, about 480 employees would prepare a total of 50,000 meals.

Before beginning to make soup, Ashley Nelson, development coordinator for the Food Bank, gave the group specific instructions.

For a little while, they would leave the finance world for food production.

Amy Branson, regional leadership officer at Fidelity, gives instructions to volunteers to make meals for the New Hampshire Food Bank. (Photo by Jodie Andruskevich)

Fidelity employees seal food packets of minestrone soup at the company’s Merrimack campus to help out the NH Food Bank. (Photo by Jodie Andruskevich)

Fidelity employees in Merrimack add ingredients to make food packets of minestrone soup. (Photo by Jodie Andruskevich)

“Now that you’ve all gone through sanitation, just a reminder, no cellphones. Please don’t touch your face, your nose, your mouth, your eyes, your hair, anything you wouldn’t want touching your food,” Nelson said. “And your hair should be securely tied back with a hairnet. If you do, by accident, touch your phone or adjust your hair or anything, just please step out, re-sanitize and change your gloves.” Nelson also reminded the group of their mission and its importance. “Remember that the food you’re packaging will be on somebody’s table,” she said. “One in nine New Hampshire residents are unsure of where their next meal is coming from, including one in seven children.”

This was the fourth year Fidelity partnered with the Food Bank for the meal-packing program, which has become the New Hampshire office’s biggest annual community give-back event, said Amy Branson, director of the regional leadership office for Fidelity.

“We’ve been able to scale it and have it take place simultaneously in both of our buildings,” said Branson, who just celebrated her 30th year with Fidelity.

The event fills up with volunteers within a week of registration, she said.

“There’s a healthy competition, but quality is top of mind,” Nelson said. “That’s why you saw the sanitation with the employees, and understanding that these meals will be going to the benefactors at the New Hampshire Food Bank, so some fun, some camaraderie building, but obviously the integrity of the meals being important.”

It’s a chance for employees to get together — something that will be top of mind beginning in September as Fidelity begins phasing in most employees to work on campus full time, ramping up a transition that has been ongoing since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Elsy Cipriani, who just completed her first year as executive director of the New Hampshire Food Bank, said she appreciates that Fidelity has been a longtime partner. This was her second time visiting the campus for the meal-packing event.

“This is great because, for volunteers, not very often are they able to see how tangible the work that they do is, so this is something extremely tangible,” Cipriani said.

This year the menu changed, based on feedback from the Food Bank’s soup kitchen and food pantry partners.

“One of the reasons we switched from macaroni and cheese to minestrone soup this year is because we wanted to provide something more nutritious for our families,” Cipriani said.

Fidelity volunteers have packed more than 144,000 meals over the past three years, bringing the total after this year to nearly 200,000, she said.

“This is great because these are meals that are going to people facing food insecurity.”

The New Hampshire Food Bank distributed 20 million pounds of food in 2025, its highest ever, Cipriani said, and the nonprofit continues to see increasing demand from its network of partner agencies, which includes emergency shelters.

“We very often connect with them, and that’s what we hear also from them — that they’re seeing twice, three times the number of people that they were seeing in the previous years,” Cipriani said.