AUBURN — Dressed in a blue sweatshirt, Gary Whiting worked diligently to offload pallet after pallet of eggs into the cold-storage area of the Good Shepherd Food-Bank in Auburn on Wednesday.

As soon as the deliveryman moved a pallet from a waiting truck, a forklift would swing by to hoist it more than 10 feet in the air to a storage shelf.

Within 30 minutes, 15,000 dozen eggs had been donated to the food bank by Moark, a Land O’Lakes wholly owned egg subsidiary.

“Someone told me that’s 180,000 eggs, but I haven’t checked the math yet,” joked food bank President Kristen Miale as she stood nearby.

The eggs, all from the Moark farm in Turner, came at a time when the pantry usually sees a dip in donations.

“We have people in Maine that are hungry 365 days a year and we see a drop-off in donations this time of year,” Miale said. “This is a huge benefit for us, because most donors focus on Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

Not only does the food bank see a dip in donations, but they have been working harder and harder to get more nutritious food on the tables of Maine’s hungry families.

“A big focus of the food bank is to get high-quality food out there,” Miale said. “Eggs, from that standpoint, are a high-quality protein with a longer shelf life, than say, meat.”

For egg producers, Easter is one of the busiest times of the year, as people buy extra eggs for dyeing and egg hunts.

According to Skip Hagy, general manager for Moark East, the California-headquartered company will give away 1.3 million eggs to 11 food banks across the United States during the Easter season.

“It’s something we do every Easter and it’s the right thing to do,” Hagy said.