CAMDEN — Early last week, Hannaford store manager Bob Josselyn and Camden-Rockport Police Chief Randy Gagne issued their challenge to the local community: Go to the Camden grocery store between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., Dec. 21, lay down $10 toward a box of meals for the local food pantry, and keep local police officers busy transporting those boxes to Camden Area Food Pantry.

Two police cruisers sat outside the Hannaford door promptly at 10 a.m. Saturday morning, their trunks open in anticipation.

The community did not disappoint. Shoppers responded to the challenge in droves, ultimately sending 440 boxes on the Fill the Cruiser campaign in a four-hour stretch.

But it didn’t stop there.

Later in the afternoon, Camden resident David Dickey, owner of the Camden Riverhouse Hotel and Inn, dropped by the store and purchased another 150 boxes, adding them to the queue out the door to the cruisers.

With that final donation, the number of boxes this season sent from the Camden Hannaford store reached 2,200 – far more than Josselyn envisioned, and beating records.

The cruisers and officers, meanwhile, made multiple trips back and forth the pantry on Mr. Battie Street in Camden.

Every year, Josselyn stacks the Helping Hands boxes, which contain dry groceries — six meals to a box — and generous customers purchase them for the food pantry. The tradition begins at Thanksgiving and continues through Christmas.

Bill Komulainen, a volunteer at the Camden Area Food Pantry, was happy to see the boxes roll in.

“It is a blessing,” he said.

The boxes, labeled Helping Hands, will go to any of the pantries that need them. Locally, more towns are establishing their own small pantries, tackling the ever present problem of hunger in Maine with a hyper-local approach. The network of the larger pantries connecting to the smaller ones is likewise growing.

Reach Editorial Director Lynda Clancy at lyndaclancy@penbaypilot.com; 207-706-6657