KOLO 8 Tuna Drive starts Tuesday May 30

RENO, Nev. (KOLO) -Traveling down the canned meat aisle, chances are many shoppers just skip by the canned tuna. But in the coming weeks, we are asking our viewers to stop the cart, and pick up a couple of cans.

For food pantries, and food banks say it might as well be a can of gold.

“Yea, it is great,” says Salma Martinez a Registered Dietitian who works with Community Health Alliance a low cost health clinic which receives food from the Food Bank of Northern Nevada. “Like I said it is shelf stable so it can be stored for long periods of time. And it is also just really full of nutrients. It is nutrient dense. It is low-calorie and it is high protein. And it is great nutrition overall.”

Beginning Tuesday May 30, 2023, KOLO 8 News Now will be collecting 5 oz cans of tuna for the Food Bank of Northern Nevada.

We ask the cans be dropped off at a collection barrel right outside our station at 4850 Ampere in Reno. Donations can be made during regular business hours.

Those cans will then be stacked in our studio so our audience can see the progress we make over the next four weeks.

We hope to collect thousands of cans.

Tuna packed in water or oil will be accepted. The tuna can be either named brand or store brand. We’ve checked around and they range from 88 cents a can to about a $1.50 a can.

But the cans must be 5 ounces only.

And there is a reason for that.

We have four weeks to fill the studio with tuna cans. In the end we hope to build a mystery structure which will be revealed and the end of June.

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