Cans of soup for a cup of joe

Businesses are getting behind Auckland City Mission’s call for cans of food as their supply runs low in the lead up to winter.

Little King Café and Harcourts Cooper & Co Milford are encouraging customers to donate cans for the cause in exchange for a coffee this Friday.

Alexis Sawyer, Fundraising Team Leader for Auckland City Mission, says “we have given out so many extra food parcels this year, we had almost used up our supply by March.”

Ms Sawyer says Auckland City Mission traditionally sees a spike in demand for food assistance at this time due to extra costs faced over winter.

“People will often get higher power bills, they might be sick and need to visit a doctor or have time off work so they won’t get paid necessarily.”

Megan Alexander, manager of Little King Café, says “Winter’s coming. That’s the time when everyone needs everything the most.”

“We will swap you a free coffee in exchange for [at least two] cans, then any proceeds go to Auckland City Mission.”

Kris Cunningham, Residential Sales Consultant for Harcourts Milford, spoke to Little King Café about running another ‘Can for a Cup’ initiative after seeing Auckland City Mission’s Facebook post calling for help.

Ms Sawyer says the family food parcels last for four days and contain 22 cans, as well as other food products such as bread, milk, meat and vegetables.

“In the last 12 months we have almost distributed 15,000 food parcels for families and individuals.”

Ms Sawyer says 80 per cent of food parcel recipients are families with low incomes who have “run out of money for food and have needed to turn to a food bank to ask for food assistance”.

“[Auckland City Mission] do amazing work, and I’ve seen the queues of people lining up for emergency food parcels, it’s tough,” says Mr Cunningham.

Ms Sawyer says they rely on donated items to fill their food parcels.

“If they are not donated to us then we need to buy them, which is a huge cost to us.”

Mr Cunningham says the ‘Can For A Cup’ project “always gets a pretty good response”. They are expecting to raise about 300 to 400 cans.

“It’s incredible when businesses like Little King do things like that because its making it easy for people in the community to do something positive.

“It’s a wonderful way to show community spirit,”says Ms Sawyer.

Ms Sawyer says “often our winter drive gets us between 60,000 and 80,000 cans of food each year.”

Ms Alexander says she will “see what Auckland City Missions goals are for their community projects, and see what else we can do for them.”