Generosity has food rescue charity ‘bursting at the seams’

A new storage warehouse has been donated to a charity that has been struggling to keep up with the generosity of Kiwis donating unwanted food.

The Auckland branch of KiwiHarvest has been straining to process thousands of kilograms of fare received each month, a large percentage of the 80 - 100,000 kg of unsaleable or damaged products donated across New Zealand.

The new warehouse, which has been donated by the Goodman Foundation, would mean larger commercial producers could now be handled, said KiwiHarvest spokesperson Amélie Schoen.

“We aren’t talking about little boxes of food anymore. We are talking about the big stuff,” she said.

The charity sorts items into 10 kg crates which are then trucked around greater Auckland to organisations who allocate it to food banks.

Currently, the charity works out of a small building in Ellerslie, where Ms Shoen said they were bursting at the seams.

Volunteer Maddie Willis said the new storage facility would make the whole process more efficient.

“It means we will be able to receive and sort through food on a much bigger scale,” she said.

It would also mean producers could drop off the goods and the organisations could collect them directly from the warehouse.

The average household sends around 79 kg of edible food to the landfill every year, according to statistics provided by Love Food Hate Waste NZ.