Podcast: the detail
In the midst of a cost of living crisis where families struggle to get food on the table, tons and tons of quality products are thrown away before it even reaches customers. The detail visits the South Auckland warehouse of the New Zealand Food Network.
While Gavin Findlay was working at food rescue organization KiwiHarvest, he got a call from someone offering them 50 tons of carrots for free.
“What can you do?” the supplier asked.
Findlay replied, “We can take maybe two tons of that.”
KiwiHarvest may have grown into one of the largest food rescue organizations in the country, but that’s all it takes.
“That’s about four tubs of carrots. That was the volume we could handle before that product went bad and spoiled.”
Findlay says it was hard to turn down so many free products.
“If you know it’s going to landfill, which creates greenhouse gases, and if you know it’s going to help you.
“But physically we just didn’t have the space, resources or funding to do that.”
It was those kinds of calls that prompted Findlay and his team to create the New Zealand Food Network, a sister company of KiwiHarvest.
Started in the early days of the pandemic, The Food Network is a nationwide distributor of surplus food from major manufacturers.
Findlay describes the Food Network as the “big wholesaler” compared to its sister company the “small local retailer”.
“There was a gap in handling some of the large amounts of food surplus generated in the commercial sector that we saw going to landfill,” he says.
That was an “absolute environmental threat”.
But there was also a huge social need – people find it very difficult to put enough nutritious food on the table.
“We knew there was a huge food surplus that couldn’t find a home – a few hundred pallets of product that went to waste, 20 tons of fish, 50 tons of vegetables. That volume just couldn’t be handled by any of the existing entities,” says Findlay. .
“If we [KiwiHarvest] couldn’t handle that, no one else could.”
In May 2020, Findlay and his team received $5.5 million from the government to set up the Food Network. That money came from a $32 million package designed to increase food security.
It is the only food rescue organization to operate on a large scale, with the ability to pick, palletize, store, stack, refrigerate or freeze items – and ship it to 171 hubs across the country. send.
Through the hubs, the Food Network has distributed more than 11 million kilos of food, or almost 32 million meals.
By doing so, it has removed the equivalent of more than 17 million kilograms of carbon dioxide from the landfill.
The Food Network has 79 donors of food surpluses, mainly large manufacturers, growers, wholesalers and packing stations. At his warehouse in South Auckland, Findlay explains: The detail how it receives, packs and repacks the bulk food for the hubs.
He says the amount of food rescued is still a fraction of what goes to landfill in both commercial and household waste — and the Food Network could have more.
The government just got $440,000 to install more chillers and freezers.
Despite the magnitude of the food waste problem, many producers are unaware of the food rescue industry.
“We still run into entities that say, ‘Gosh, I wish I’d known about you five years ago.’ There’s still an opportunity for us to make more of a difference,” Findlay says.
There is a difference between surplus food that is still edible, but cannot be sold, and food waste, which cannot be consumed by humans, but sent to compost or animal feed.
In the warehouse, Findlay . takes The detail along the floor-to-ceiling shelving, explaining how the excess food they receive is often a surprise, rejected because the packaging is damaged, the product is only on trial, the fruits and vegetables aren’t perfect, or the wrong ingredients were added.
“We had a fantastic little sample at KiwiHarvest when I first came. I got a call from an entity to say, ‘Look, I have 10 pallets of this product, it’s called chicken risotto. Just a minor problem, we forgot to put the chicken in it.”
They took the 10 pallets of chicken risotto with chicken.
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