Built for good: How Lineage empowers our team to serve our communities

Walk into a Lineage facility and you’ll see what you’d expect: pallets of temperature-controlled product, warehouse teams coordinating movements and the day-to-day work of keeping the food supply chain running.

But there’s more to it. There’s another layer to the work that consists of hundreds of team members who volunteer their time to help communities in need through the Lineage Foundation for Good.

This work isn’t driven by a single initiative or a top-down directive. It’s something that’s naturally taken shape over time. It’s built on a shared understanding that if there’s an opportunity to help, we will step up.

How giving back takes shape across the Lineage network

Lineage has worked to instill a commitment to servant leadership and giving back into our organizational culture from the beginning.

And, nearly five years ago, that mindset of service drove us to found the Lineage Foundation for Good to act as an independent charity partner to help leverage Lineage’s scale, network and team to “do some good” in the communities in which we live and work.

It also drove us to create the Time for Good program to help make it that much easier for our team members to get involved in volunteering and service within our communities. Time for Good provides each member of the Lineage team in good standing with paid volunteer hours that let team members give back to local nonprofit partners at work serving our friends, neighbors and families.

Lineage has created an environment whereby our team can have a positive impact, but we can only have that impact if our team members lean into our value of servant leadership and seize the opportunity to do good.

While there’s no single blueprint for creating a local culture of giving back, we’ve worked to create a framework where volunteerism can take root within our four walls.

In one location, it might start with a conversation about a nearby food bank. In another, it’s a team member raising their hand to organize something small. These small moments often grow into something bigger with a little help from our Champions for Good program.

Champions for Good are Lineage team members who help connect people, ideas and opportunities with the communities in need.

Champions serve as the boots on the ground who identify local needs, bring teams together and create space for action across the organization. From there, the work takes on its own rhythm. People show up. Others follow. What starts as a single idea snowballs into a team effort.

We see this pattern replicate across the Lineage network. Someone steps up as a Champion and the dominoes start falling.

It’s a global program that intentionally roots itself locally with each team. Because the team is able to connect with local partners who need and value our support, the impact both feels and is in actuality more personal. The people our team members help are similarly rooted in the same towns and neighborhoods in which we live and work. And the team members closest to the community are the ones shaping how, when and where they give back.

Where impact takes shape across the network

When you zoom out, you start to see just how different that impact can look.

In Canada, one effort began with a customer who was already committed to giving back but was running into limits on how far they could take it.

Nature’s Touch had been donating frozen fruits and vegetables for years, with a goal of reaching more students in remote communities. But getting temperature-sensitive product to those locations, consistently and safely, wasn’t simple. The logistics made it difficult to scale.

That’s where Lineage team members stepped in. Not to lead the effort, but to help bridge the gaps and move it forward.

Working alongside Nature’s Touch and Breakfast Club of Canada, Lineage teams helped coordinate storage, transportation and delivery, helping make sure the product stayed at the right temperature from warehouse to final destination. With that support in place, what had been constrained by logistics started to expand.

The result was thousands of pounds of nutritious food reaching students in remote communities, something that hadn’t been possible at that scale before.

Across the Lineage network, the work looks different but feels the same.

Teams organize local donation drives. They volunteer their time. They support community partners in ways that are often small at first but add up over time.

Some of it is planned. Some of it happens quickly, in response to a need that comes up. But the pattern is consistent. People notice something. They decide to do something about it and more often than not, they don’t do it alone.

That’s how it spreads.

Turning individual action into collective impact

That same mindset doesn’t stop at the individual level. In some cases, it spreads across entire teams. At Lineage’s Hobart site, that kind of collective effort has taken shape in a way that reaches well beyond the facility itself.

The site was recently recognized through the Henningsen Service Award, an honor that traces back to the Henningsen Cold Storage legacy. Long before joining Lineage, the Henningsen family built a reputation for giving back to their communities. That spirit didn’t go away with the acquisition; it became something to carry forward.

Today, the award recognizes sites that are deeply engaged in their communities, where giving back isn’t occasional. It’s part of how the team operates.

As this year’s recipient, the Hobart team received $25,000 grants from both the Henningsen Family Foundation and the Lineage Foundation for Good, which they directed toward organizations in their community, including the Food Bank of Northwest Indiana, Phil’s Friends and the Northwest Indiana chapter of the Red Cross.

It’s a good example of what happens when that culture becomes shared. It isn’t always just one person leading the effort, but a group of people deciding to show up together, again and again, in ways that matter locally.

Recognizing those who lead for good

Each year, there are individuals across Lineage who take that extra step. They find ways to support their communities on top of everything else they’re responsible for. They bring others with them and, together, they follow through.

That’s where the Servant Leader for Good recognition comes in.

Throughout the year, Lineage recognizes individual team members who went beyond their day-to-day roles and responsibilities to bring these values to life and to serve their communities.

Each of these individuals is named a Servant Leader for Good, and through the Lineage Foundation for Good, they’re given the opportunity to support a food bank or pantry that matters to them with a $1,000 grant, extending their impact even further.

In 2025, the Lineage Foundation for Good recognized eight individuals for actions including organizing volunteer events at local food pantries and community gardens, helping train new Champions for Good, building new relationships with charitable organizations and raising awareness around food waste.

At the end of the year, one annual Servant Leader for Good is selected based on their impact and actions.

In recognition, the Foundation provides that individual the opportunity to issue a $5,000 grant to a charity of their choice, helping amplify the work they’ve already started in their community.

Introducing 2025’s Servant Leader for Good

2025’s Annual Servant Leader for Good was Brent Terrell – Safety Specialist, Jackson, MS.

A U.S. Army veteran, Brent has made giving back a part of his life, both personally and professionally. He supports efforts to give back to military veterans and their families and has accrued close to 1,000 service hours since 2023. He often works as a member of the Lineage Employee Resource Group (ERG), LinVets, passionately supporting efforts to organize with other veterans at Lineage to amplifying their impact of giving back to the veteran community.

Congratulations and thank you to Brent and all of our Servant Leaders for Good. What stands out isn’t just what they did. It’s how they did it. Consistently. Without a lot of attention or direction.

They stepped up because there was a need and we are proud to count them as team members.

A culture that’s more than any one story

What stands out across all of this isn’t any single story. It’s the pattern behind it. 

Different teams and regions have the same instinct: step up when there’s an opportunity to help. And Lineage is proud to have fostered a culture where that instinct can be acted on to do real good.

As the Lineage Foundation for Good reaches its five-year anniversary, the impact our team has is easy to see. Not just in individual efforts, but in the consistency behind them. The Foundation helps make it possible, but it’s the team members that carry it forward. And the real impact happens in moments that don’t always get captured. 

It’s the small decisions, the follow-through, the willingness to do a little more than what’s required that can end up making the biggest difference.