Food - Businesses encouraged to donate leftover food

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Food – Businesses encouraged to donate leftover food

ELEANOR HALL: Australian governments are backing a new campaign to encouraging more businesses to donate their leftover food to people in need, instead of throwing it away.

The firms are being urged to give their unwanted food to organisations like OzHarvest, a not-for-profit group that operates in cities across Australia.

The World Today’s Adam Harvey hitched a ride with one of OzHarvest’s Sydney vans.

ADAM HARVEY: In a refrigerated warehouse in Sydney’s inner south, Tom Sawkins and Mathias Bahner are loading boxes of vegetable soup into a yellow van.

TOM SAWKINS: Yeah this came from Ali Baba, so Ali Baba’s one of our latest food donors which now is over 1,400. It’s short dated products, that’s the window we operate in. They’re short dated, they’re too short for the shop because they can’t sell them.

Shops want, you know, six weeks or a month of shelf life or even longer. So when they make a batch, and they make a bit too much and they’re not selling it fast enough…

ADAM HARVEY: Today Mathias’ first stop is the back dock of Woolworths at Eastgardens, where a small mountain of vegetables is waiting.

WOOLWORTH’S WORKER: It’s a bit of everything – fruit, tomatoes, bananas, broccoli, zucchini and a bit of other vegie.

ADAM HARVEY: It’s all still okay…

WOOLWORTH’S WORKER: Still okay but it’s for the standard of the department it’s not 100 per cent so…

ADAM HARVEY: Mathias Bahner drives one of OzHarvest’s nine Sydney vans. He’s got a list of donors with him, and one of today’s first stops is well known to Sydney foodies: Bourke Street Bakery in Alexandria.

The head baker Paul Giddings.

PAUL GIDDINGS: So yeah lots of our pies, leftover pastries, the sort of things that, you know, we just don’t keep, they don’t have a shelf life with us you know. They’re baked and made you know, we sort of, we limit it to a one day sale and out they go.

ADAM HARVEY: OzHarvest’s job is to find a new home for the food.

TOM SAWKINS: We have soup kitchens, refuges, youth hostels, schools, primary schools – right across that range.

ADAM HARVEY: Why would you be giving food to primary schools?

TOM SAWKINS: Unfortunately some of these kids come to school hungry.

ADAM HARVEY: A new Food Donation Kit launched by the State Government tells businesses how to get in touch with food rescue companies like OzHarvest.

An amendment to Food Donation legislation means that businesses that give unwanted food can’t be liable for any food poisoning cases.

TOM SAWKINS: Now a donor can give food without fear of prosecution. The actual food handling law has not changed – so that, that’s still in place. The donor as in, you know, whoever that might be, still has the responsibility when giving us the food to make sure that that food is still edible, it’s kept refrigerated if needed to be refrigerated.

All of those laws are still in place, because all these vans are refrigerated.

ADAM HARVEY: To make sure the food stays fresh, Mathias needs to empty his van almost as quickly as he filled it up.

So an hour or so after collecting the pies, vegies and a pallet of yoghurt, he pulls into the driveway of a halfway house in North Ryde called The Hut.

The Hut caters for people with schizophrenia, some of whom are here to help unload the van.

RESIDENT 1: It just makes the centre – because we don’t get much money from the Government – to run better.

RESIDENT 2: Well we get yoghurt, we get sandwiches, we get good things.

ADAM HARVEY: Jennifer Wellsmore is one of the staff.

JENNIFER WELLSMORE: We try to make nutritional choices, so we’ve just rejected a can of soft drink, a case of soft drink, we’ve rejected that, you know, we don’t want those sorts of things. But we try to take the nutritional things and we take what we think we can use.

ADAM HARVEY: So the vegies find a new home, they take some of the yoghurt, but what about the pies?

JENNIFER WELLSMORE: Yes we don’t…

ADAM HARVEY: Smart.

JENNIFER WELLSMORE: Yeah exactly.

ADAM HARVEY: They’re good pies from Bourke Street Bakery.

JENNIFER WELLSMORE: Well exactly, yes no we’ll take those very happily, thank you very much.

ELEANOR HALL: Making me hungry! Jennifer Wellsmore from The Hut, ending that report from Adam Harvey.

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