Millions of pounds of food 'rescued' as waste diversion pushes food to charity sector
CBC
Every Wednesday on her lunch break, Leftovers volunteer Toks Bakinson jumps in her car and drives to Little Caesars on 17th Avenue.
She fills the trunk and backseat with unsold, refrigerated pizza, checks the temperature of the boxes to ensure food safety, then drives to a local youth drop-in centre and marches stack after stack of pizza into the building.
It's roughly $1,500 worth of unsold pizza — a gift to the community through a food rescue app that Bakinson feels great about.
But she's also worried.
"It's a solution for the homeless shelters because now they don't have to think about providing food for their residents for quite a while. I mean, look at this amount of pizza," she says.
"But I think it's a Band-Aid because it gives the businesses an excuse to waste food. They're like, 'Oh, we're going to donate it so it doesn't matter how many they make.'"
Welcome to the complex world of food rescue.
Cell phone apps that make it easier for grocery stores, restaurants and catering companies to donate food have taken off, especially in the last year.
Last month alone, 39 restaurants saved their excess usable food and gave it charities through the non-profit Leftovers.
WATCH | See how much food this volunteer rescues in just one trip to help feed others
Another 105 grocers, caterers and restaurant chains in Calgary donated through an app from the non-profit Second Harvest since September.
Still others donated through the post-secondary initiative Zero Food Waste for the on-campus food bank, and in addition, 26 local grocery stores have made a commitment to be zero waste, working with the B.C.-based organization Loop Resource to redirect everything unsold to 12 charities or 375 local farmers.
And there are other apps, too.
These programs are filling hungry bellies and have kept millions of pounds of food from getting composted or thrown away.