Drink Pink: Fueling Breast Cancer Research at Fred Hutch

This week starts our annual Drink Pink campaign, where we donate $1 to Fred Hutch for every quart of strawberry milk that’s purchased through our home delivery service. We started and continue to do this campaign in honor of the Smith family matriarch, our employees and customers, and their families who have been affected by cancer.

Since 2014, you have helped us donate $133,810 to Fred Hutch, with more than $120,000 of that amount being donated since 2017. This year’s goal is $25,000 and we are asking for your help once again!

How You Can Help

Add a Quart (or More!) of Strawberry Milk

For every quart of strawberry milk that’s purchased through our home delivery service from May 16th to June 10th, $1 is donated to Fred Hutch for breast cancer research. Add a quart to your Smith Brothers Farms delivery order today!

Make a Monetary Donation Online

In addition to purchasing strawberry milk, you can contribute to Drink Pink by making a monetary donation online. Select the amount you want to give of $1 or more.

Your online donation will contribute to the Family Assistance Fund at Fred Hutch. This fund, which is supported entirely by private donations, helps qualifying patients and their families with non-medical, everyday expenses such as groceries and child care. This support provides the tools and resources families need to find a measure of comfort and stability while navigating their cancer treatments.

Your Support Makes a Difference

Generous donations made through our Drink Pink campaign support leading breast cancer research at Fred Hutch.

• Increasing genetic counseling to reduce breast cancer for women at risk
  

  Dr. Vida Henderson is determined to rewrite a tragic story: Black women have a 41% higher death rate from breast cancer than white women. That’s partly because many don’t realize they have a hereditary risk for the disease, so they don’t seek out the genetic counseling or preventive screening that might find an early-stage breast cancer when it’s treatable. Dr. Henderson, who is a public health and communications researcher, has developed a video intervention to educate Black women with a family history of breast cancer about what genetic counseling is and how it could help them. Next, she hopes to study “cascade testing,” which would ensure family members, who may also be at higher risk, have the information they need as well.
  
  

• Good news: Breast cancer overdiagnosis is uncommon
  

  Are women truly being overdiagnosed with breast cancer? That’s the controversial question Dr. Ruth Etzioni set out to answer. Estimates for overdiagnosis, defined as a mammogram that spots a breast cancer that wouldn’t become symptomatic or otherwise cause harm, have ranged as high as 54%. The Fred Hutch biostatistician developed a more accurate estimate using a mathematical model based on 36,000 screening participants. The answer: overdiagnosis is much less frequent than thought. The predicted overdiagnosis rate was 15.3% when with screening was done every other year. Of that, 6% of cases were due to the detection of slow-growing or inconsequential breast cancers, and 9.3% were due to “competing mortality,” meaning the cancer would not progress to a life-threatening stage before the patient died of other causes.
  
  

• Putting stress on cancer cells to stop the spread
  

  One in five early-stage breast cancer patients will go on to develop metastasis within 20 years, also known as stage 4 cancer, where tumor cells spread to other parts of the body and begin growing unchecked. While there are therapies to slow metastatic disease, there is still no cure.  Dr. Cyrus Ghajar and his team are taking an unusual approach to finding a cure: they looked at a part of the body which is able to stop the metastatic process, muscle tissue. They discovered that muscle tissues, which are constantly contracting, are too stressful an environment for tumor cells to proliferate. The team hopes to use this information to make places in the body that breast cancer cells invade — like the lungs, liver, and brain — just as inhospitable.

Together, Smith Brothers Farms, our generous community, and Fred Hutch are taking action to improve and save lives.

Thank you for your support!