Get more product details (SKU/Family) in Quote template

Hello,
I’m finally working on some templates for our use case. I’m looking at the $items object and I see that it doesn’t include some of the information about each product. here’s the item object dump:

 [item_amount_id] => 30
 [item_id] => 30
 [item_subtotal] => 13630.00
 [item_tax_total] => 0.00
 [item_discount] => 0.00
 [item_total] => 13630.00
 [quote_id] => 13
 [item_tax_rate_id] => 1
 [item_date_added] => 2016-06-20
 [item_name] => MyItemName
 [item_description] => MyItemDescription
 [item_quantity] => 50.00
 [item_price] => 272.60
 [item_discount_amount] => 0.00
 [item_order] => 2
 [item_family] =>
 [item_tax_rate_percent] => 0.00

I see that the item_family key is there, but the value is empty. How would I go about fixing that and adding the product SKU to the available keys in the object?
Thanks!