Lake Country Food Bank gets a lift

This Friday, the Lake Country Food Bank will accept a $11,700 gift, and food banks from Revelstoke to Peachland will benefit.

The gift is a pallet stacker, an electrically powered forklift capable of moving and handling loads of up to one metric tonne each. It was paid for by the Rotary Club of Lake Country with support from 11 other Rotary clubs and the international Rotary Foundation.

The new machine is needed because of two things: the growing role of the Lake Country Food Bank as a distribution centre and the growing movement to avoid wasting food — any food.

When the food bank took possession of its new permanent home (a $1-million project also funded with Rotary leadership) in January 2016, it received about 5,000 pounds of perishable food donations a year.

In 2016, the donations rose to 20,000 pounds; in 2017, to 43,000 pounds. This year, donations already exceed 90,000 pounds.

Those donations are distributed up and down the Okanagan Valley, and beyond it to Salmon Arm and occasionally even Revelstoke.

Lake Country’s new building originally had an unfinished and unoccupied lower floor. By completing its construction and installing refrigeration equipment, the Lake Country Food Bank was able to become a Food Recovery Centre for a network of other food banks.

The member food banks of this Helping Through Sharing network — Peachland, Vernon, Kelowna, Lake Country, Lumby, Cherryville, Revelstoke and Salmon Arm — all now have refrigeration vehicles, thanks to a grant from Food Banks B.C.

The Food Recovery Centre in the Lake Country Food Bank will be independently accessible to them, any time, any day of the week. They can pick up supplies; they can drop off supplies to be passed on to other food banks.

By way of example, last year the Vernon Food Bank got a donation of too many eggs for it to deal with.

Vernon sent the extra eggs to Lake Country, and Lake Country made them available to all other food banks in their network.

Until now, this work of sorting and stacking has had to be done manually. The local food bank now has about 80 regular volunteers, not counting the days when school classes come in to help. But, as manager Joy Paxton says, “Most of our volunteers are retirees; they’re the ones who have time to help out.”

For really heavy lifting, Paxton says, “The hockey team has come over from the arena across the parking lot!”

The new pallet stacker will make it possible for the Lake Country Food Bank’s regular volunteers to handle tonnes of deliveries without risk or injury.

The volume of donations has soared largely because Save-OnFoods has committed to zero waste. Any perishable foods that can’t be sold immediately are given to the food bank. Nothing gets thrown out.

Usable produce goes immediately to local patrons of the food bank or gets shipped out to other food banks. There’s nothing wrong with the fruit and vegetables. They’ve simply grown riper than what customers typically prefer to buy in the store.

Any unusable produce goes to farmers feeding livestock.

“Very little goes into compost,” Paxton says.

Local farmers are very much part of the process. The community farm provides fresh produce in season, delivered directly to the food bank for distribution.

Save-On-Foods is also supporting the food bank by offering gift cards. For every dollar spent using these pre-paid grocery cards, 16 cents goes to the Lake Country Food Bank — eight per cent as a discount from Save-On itself, another eight per cent as a matching donation from an anonymous donor, at no additional charge to the customer.

Save-On gift cards are available from any Rotary member, or from four retail locations in Lake Country: UBR Services on Bottom Wood Lake Road; Interior Savings Credit Union; Ace Hardware on Woodsdale Road; and Winfield IDA Pharmacy in the Turtle Bay Crossing mall.

The official ceremony of gifting the new pallet stacker to the Lake Country Food Bank is at 11 a.m. Friday. The public is invited.