The consolidation of three facilities at 890 Forty Foot Road has allowed SKF USA Inc. to more than triple its Thanksgiving food donations, according to Mary Beth Roberts, the company's director of distributor branch development.

SKF, with the help of the North Penn High School's Air Force Jr. ROTC, contributed food to Family Service of Montgomery County. The delivery will provide full Thanksgiving meals for 70 families, according to Roberts, who also chairs SKF's community care team.

Ten uniformed cadets loaded the food onto a school bus Friday morning bound for Family Service, a private, not-for-profit, social service agency in Norristown that serves more than 15,000 people.

Nearly all the facility's 400 employees — as well as a few local supermarkets — contributed to the food drive, according to Roberts. She said the company's former facility in Trooper had made a similar donation.

"We've done this every year," Roberts said. "The idea is to make sure we'll still touching the At SKF, we encourage our employees to take part in these actions that can make a positive impact on the community."

An SFK employee suggested inviting the ROTC to help deliver the food, according to Roberts.

"They were very willing," she said.

The ROTC students — who unloaded the food at the Family Service — treated the event as a field trip, according to Charlotte Fiedler, a senior buyer for SKF and the food drive organizer.

The meals should be delivered before Thanksgiving, according to Roberts.

"Our cadets are quite excited at the opportunity to help," said Chief Dee Sullivan, the ROTC instructor. "And we hope that it will become a tradition to be involved in this awesome endeavor. Although this is our first outing for the SKF food drive, we are quite involved and are always looking for new opportunities to help the community."

On Nov. 19, the Towamencin facility — which serves as the corporate headquarters for the Swedish company that manufactures and designs ball bearings, seals and mechatronics — collected canned goods and monetary donations to benefit Manna on Main Street, in Lansdale, and the Northampton Food Bank, according to Roberts.

She said the company wanted to continue to help the locations of its former facilities, which include Trooper and the Lehigh Valley.

"We didn't want to desert those communities," Fiedler said.

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