Nourished for Nil marks five years of serving food
Hastings-based food rescue Nourished for Nil is celebrating its fifth year serving the community.
The team, based next to the selfserve Gull station on Karamu Rd, takes food that would otherwise go to waste and redistributes it to those in need.
They also have three other branch locations in Flaxmere, Camberley and Napier.
In those five years, Nourished for Nil has rescued and redistributed 2.5 million kilograms of food.
In the past 12 months, Nourished for Nil has given out 81,483kg of bread, or about 116,400 loaves.
Nourished for Nil founder Christina McBeth said food waste in cafes is what inspired her to start the charity.
“There are a lot of people going without in Hawke’s Bay that would benefit from that.
“It was a commercial kitchen, it is still the same day, surely we could find a way to redirect this to those in the community who would appreciate it?”
She said cafe waste now formed only a small part of their donated food, which can come from leftover produce from stores and gardens, products past their best before, unpopular product lines and rejected products from stores and producers.
“We once got a whole bunch of Hershey’s chocolate because it wasn’t their most popular brand, so they replaced it with their popular brand. They had about eight banana boxes of chocolate bars and were, like, ‘Here you go’. You name it, we get anything and everything in between.”
She said people could choose exactly what they wanted to have from the food provided, and can return items they don’t use from the parcels.
She said popular food items were pies or frozen meat.
“One thing that never gets returned is a pie. Any sort of meat product that is frozen before its use-by date.”
She said vegetables tended to get returned on a regular basis.