BATON ROUGE — LSU will hold a celebration at Alex Box Stadium Wednesday at 7 p.m. to celebrate the Tigers’ 8th national championship in men’s baseball.
Tens out thousands of dollars for the LSU Food Bank were also secured throughout the College World Series Tournament, thanks to a competition involving cups of congealed sugar and vodka, colored purple and gold, of course.
LSU fans purchased a total of 52,390 jello shots throughout the tournament, raising $52,390 for the LSU food bank.
In recent years, Rocco’s jello shot challenge has become almost as famous as the College World Series itself. Rocco’s Pizza and Cantina is a restaurant located only a toss of a baseball away from Charles Schwab Field in Omaha, the site of the annual College Baseball World Series.
Origins of the Challenge
In 2019, Rocco’s owner Kevin Culjat started a new tradition, when his bar started selling jello shots dyed the colors of each team competing in the MCWS, a tradition that had started years earlier with bottles of dyed alcohol dubbed rally shots.
By 2021, a board was set up behind the bar tallying which schools had purchased the most shots and Rocco’s Jello Shot challenge quickly rose to social media stardom.
“Social media plays a part, both good and bad. People were saying, ‘He’s making these for $0.17 cents in his basement,’ just bashing me for trying to sell jello. I’m like, ‘That’s not the purpose.’ I sell pizza and beer to make money. Jello was just something that was supposed to be fun,” Culjat said.
“So I went home and talked to my wife and we got on the internet. I was like, ‘Where am I going to donate? Is it going to the teams? Is it going to the schools?’ Well then I found the food banks at both Arkansas and at the University of Mississippi and when I started reading, I realized that down in Mississippi, 49% of the people that used the food bank were employees of the University.”
Each Jell-O shot is sold for $5 with $1 from each shot funding the local food bank connected to the school and another 50 cents from each shot going toward the Heartland Food Bank in Omaha.
The competition has only grown more fierce in recent years. In 2021, Mississippi State fans set a then record of 3,000 shots purchased on their way to winning the school’s first ever national title in baseball. By 2023, LSU fans shattered that record with nearly 69,000 jello shots purchased, including the Guiness Book of World Records most shots ordered in a single purchase when Raising Cane’s founder and LSU superfan, Todd Graves, bought $15,000 worth of shots.
Baton Rouge based injury attorney Gordon McKernan then upped Graves’ record by purchasing 8,888 jello shots in one purchase four days later, amounting to $44,440 worth of shots.
That total amounted to $68,888 donated to the LSU campus foodbank.
“LSU has a food bank?”
Two years later that money is still being utilized to fight on campus food insecurity, Jennifer Cristina, with the food bank told UWK.
On an average day during the school year, she said the pantry services around 300-400 students per day and around 100 students per day during the summer, which amounted to over 300,000 lbs of food donated across 45,000 visits in 2024.
While Cristina has been with the University for years, she said she only became aware of the on campus food bank when she started helping run the program two years ago.
“When I heard that the money from this jello shot challenge that was getting all of this publicity was going to the LSU Food Bank, I asked ‘LSU has a food bank?’ Why would they need that? Students don’t need food. They should give it to families and then I got into this role, and I was able to see how many students rely on this and how much food insecurity there is,” Cristina explained.
According to a 2022 study from the U.S. Government Accountability Office, 23% of college students in the U.S. experience food insecurity annually, which amounts to around 3.8 million students.
“We have students from start to finish of all age ranges, nationalities, and majors. The beautiful thing about the pantry is that we have volunteers from all over the campus as well so it attracts a lot of service minded people who may not normally work together,” Cristina said.
The LSU Food Pantry is only one of dozens of food banks around the area subsidized by the Greater Baton Rouge Area Food Bank. While all of the money from the jello shot challenge goes towards the LSU Food Pantry, organization president Mike Manning says those donations open up funds for other food banks, which is more vital now than ever.
Because of cuts at the federal level, Manning says funding for the food bank is down around 30% year over year so another major donation to the LSU Food Pantry could continue opening up funds for the organization.
“It frees us up to focus more on the other pantries and helps us spread food around more because we have limited resources so if LSU can step up with those kinds of resources, we don’t have to provide them as much and it makes it better for all the other agencies concerned,” Manning explained.
Those funds go towards more than just boxed pasta and Hamburger Helper, Manning noted.
“Everybody talks about food banks and says ‘Oh, they’re just giving them canned good’,” Manning said. “Roughly 40% of the food we distribute is either produce or fresh or frozen proteins. It’s totally different than what people imagine of food banks of the past, of it being macaroni and cheese and a can of beans.”
In order for the Greater Baton Rouge Area Food Bank to continue servicing the eleven parishes and 50 thousand people monthly that it continues to support, Manning said they rely on not only food or monetary donations like the ones from the Jello Shot Challenge, but also on people donating their own time.
“Last year, we got the equivalent of 28 full-time employees from our volunteers and we can’t afford to hire 28 more people, that’s for sure. They are instrumental to our success,” Manning said.
If interested in volunteering with the Greater Baton Rouge Area Food Bank, visit their website or download their phone app where volunteers can schedule shifts at all food bank locations.
Back at Rocco’s, with only around a week left until the start of the tournament, Culjat says he just ordered 120,000 jello shots so he’s hoping for another record breaking year, and waiting on LSU and its tens of thousands of shot buying fans.
“I’ve got a couple of groups saying they can beat it (LSU’s record) but until somebody does, I’d have to see it to believe it,” Culjat said. “68,000 shots is a lot of jello.”
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