Super-sized hub rescuing food for region’s hungry
Grocery store will divert thousands of pounds of good food to warehouse that supplies food banks
A large warehouse in Esquimalt is now the capital region’s hub for “rescuing” food and distributing it to groups that help those in need.
“See this apple,” Ralf Mundel of Thrifty Foods said to a crowd that gathered last week for the opening of the facility at 808 Viewfield Rd.
“Would you eat this apple?” he asked, holding up the shiny red fruit. Nods and “yeses” came from the crowd.
“It has a big bruise on one side. Now tell me, would you buy this apple?” he asked to a response of mostly silence.
“We have an abundance of perfectly delicious food like this but we can’t sell it. This is where food rescue comes in,” said Mundel.
Thrifty Foods will divert up to 4,500 pounds of food a day from nine stores to the centre that would otherwise be composted or thrown out. Perishable and nonperishable food that is slightly damaged or near its due date from a variety of donors will be sorted at the 13,500-square-foot warehouse and redistributed to the community. This includes food banks, low-income seniors, First Nations groups and schools.
Up to 1.4 million pounds of food a year could come through the centre, said Rudi Wallace from the Victoria Foundation.
The organization helped fund the formation of the Food Share Network, a group of about 40 nonprofits that started working on the distribution centre in 2013.
The Victoria Foundation estimates about 50,000 people in the region are insecure about having enough food, with 20,000 using food banks each year. According to Food Bank Canada, food bank use in B.C. was at an all-time high in 2016. About a third of users were children and youth.
The Rotary Clubs of Greater Victoria raised $100,000 for the distribution centre, which was matched by the Victoria Foundation. The warehouse is leased from the Capital Regional District, which originally purchased the building for a sewage treatment plant that was later shot down by public opposition.
“This is incredible. Cold storage is at a premium on the Island,” said Wallace, walking through a massive refrigerated room and freezer the size of a shipping container.
The Mustard Seed Food Bank operates the centre and uses it as a warehouse. This freed up space at the non-profit’s Hope Farm healing centre in Duncan and its Victoria centre on Queens Avenue, where food hampers are distributed for about 5,000 people a month.
“We’ll be able to renovate our space and make it more like a grocery store for people to pick out what they want in their hampers,” said Allan Lingwood, director of development.
Half a dozen volunteers sorted through bins of onions, potatoes and kale in the midst of the launch party.
The distribution centre will need about 60 volunteers to operate, with truckloads of food coming in and out each day.
Andy Liu has volunteered with the Mustard Seed for about a month. “It’s a karma thing for me,” said Liu, who works in a jewelry shop downtown.
He was inspired to work in the food distribution centre after reading about a project in the United States that provided rescued food in a low-income grocery store.
“I’m Chinese and for us to waste food is like a cardinal sin. Someone out there is always starving. In China, as many people live below the poverty line that live in Canada,” said Liu.
In addition to redistributing food, the centre also composts, and donates unusable produce as animal feed. It will have a processing kitchen that can be used for social enterprise projects, rented out to businesses, and as a teaching space.