Connecting a world of excess to A WORLD OF NEED

For just 90cents Food Forward SA is able to facilitate the delivery of a meal’s worth of good quality edible surplus food to the food insecure. Ahead of World Hunger Day on Tuesday, Hilary Biller spoke to MD Andy du Plessis

Food-Forward-SA started out as Feed-Back Food Distribution, a small organisation in which a van was used to collect surplus food from film sets for organisations in need.

In 2017 the name was changed to Food-Forward SA, with the aim to connect a world of excess to a world of need by recovering quality edible surplus food from the consumer goods supply chain and distributing it to registered community organisations that serve the poor. More than 80% of the food recovered is nutritious food and our vision is a SA without hunger.

World Hunger Day is an initiative of The Hunger Project and the purpose of the day is to raise awareness about the problem of hunger worldwide, and encourage action towards a sustainable solution to end hunger.

An estimated 10 million tons of food ends up in landfills every year. This is goodquality edible surplus food. We are the largest food redistribution organisation in SA and implement a model called foodbanking. Retailers, manufacturers, wholesalers, farmers and growers partner with us to recover (redirect) their edible surplus food to address hunger nationally.

We source and collect edible surplus food directly from the organisations and growers, sorting and storing it at our warehouses across the country and ensure it is responsibly redistributed to registered beneficiary organisations (BOs) across SA. Our network consists of about 530 beneficiary organisations who serve about 201,000 people on a daily basis.

To commemorate World Hunger Day, for the month of May Food Lover’s Market is partnering with Food-Forward SA on their Hunger Month initiative — a monthlong in-store campaign aimed at raising awareness and funds for meals. Now in its third year, the campaign hopes to exceed 1 million meals in 2019.

We have a presence in six provinces with plans to expand into Limpopo and Mpumalanga — and are in the process of growing our rural footprint. We ensure that at least 75% of our BOs are early childhood development centres; homes for disabled persons, orphans and vulnerable children; centres that care for youth, women and the disabled; after-school projects; and old-age homes. We work from a list of poverty nodes in each region, ensuring coverage in these vulnerable communities.

If we are able to access more surplus food, we can bring about the realisation of better access to food for all our people who need it.

The root causes of food insecurity are poverty and unemployment. Government and business have a moral and economic obligation to address these complex problems. Even if they are successful, it will take years before we see access to nutritious food for all improve drastically, and the incidence of malnutrition-related diseases reduce meaningfully.

As a nonprofit organisation, Food-Forward SA continues to rely on support from corporates, foundations, trusts and individuals to sustain its operations, which means there is an important role that everyone can play in making a huge impact in solving our country’s food insecurity/hunger crisis.

It’s important to remember that in SA we produce enough food so that nobody needs to go hungry. We don’t have a scarcity problem, we have a distribution/logistics problem. About 10 million tons of food goes to waste in SA every year. That amounts to about a third of all food produced in the country. The wasted food is made up of about 44% fruit and vegetables, 26% grains, 15% meat, and 13% roots, tubers and oilseeds. Source: foodfarmmzansi.com

We don’t have a scarcity problem, we have a distribution/ logistics problem ANDY DU PLESSIS MD FOODFORWARD SA

Individuals can donate through Food-Forward SA and sign up to give a minimum of R50 per month, which helps to redistribute enough food to give someone two meals a day for a month.

Last year, Food-Forward SA recovered

4,220 tons of surplus food from the supply chain, of which 82% is nutritious food. Yet this represents less than 0,05% of the 10 million tons of surplus food that currently ends up in landfills or is incinerated.

Support Food-Forward SA www.givengain.com/cc/fillthegapmonthly.