Rescue remedy

Waikato Environment Centre's Ruth Seabright and Simon Gascoigne, food deliverer.

Hamilton's homeless and underprivileged will benefit from the Waikato Environment Centre's new food rescue initiative, Kaivolution.

Ruth Seabright of the Waikato Environment Centre said the idea behind Kaivolution food rescue is food that is still good enough to eat but not good enough to sell is rescued from being thrown away and is then redistributed to charitable groups that are working with vulnerable people.

"It can be any charitable group at all, basically any group that is giving the food away, it can't be on-sold for profit, but any group that's not for profit that work with vulnerable people can apply to be a recipient. So we've got the food bank, the night shelters, the women's refuge, community houses, those kids of groups."

Seabright said the food will be donated to Kaivolution from manufacturers and growers, market gardeners, people that supply the supermarkets, and also potentially from supermarket as well.

"Because we are just at the beginning we are targeting the bigger suppliers and the bigger donors, so a lot of it will be fresh fruit and produce or packaged foods. So it's more like the raw product as opposed to prepared food."

The Waikato Environment Centre is a charitable trust and Seabright said they have been applying for funding and doing all the preparation work for the last six months leaving them still in the process of setting up their warehouse.

"We are having a cool room built out there at the moment, so we are just in a small pilot phase so we are just getting all our systems working and just starting with a few donors and a few recipients while we just sort finish things off and make sure all our systems and process are working properly, and then we'll be taking on more donors and recipients next year."

There are around nine other food rescues around New Zealand but Seabright said they chose to establish one in Hamilton based on the Kaibosh initiative in Wellington.

"Next year we would like to have a lot more donors on board we would like to have the operation running five to seven days a week with regular donations coming in, with a wide variety of donors. When the feasibility study was conducted there were definite areas of need in terms of food, and those were fresh fruit and produce, meat and dairy. So we would really like to be able to say we are delivering on all those things."

Seabright said eventually they are aiming to have a team of 10 to 20 volunteers. "At the moment because the food donations are erratic we are actually as staff, covering that role ourselves.

"So if someone were to ring today to say they have food the staff here in the centre are covering the volunteer roles. Once there is more regularity we will need a team of volunteers to sort the food," she said.

"When the food comes in, it all gets weighed so we know exactly how much food we have received and it all gets sorted and repacked for different charities. Some charities might want more bread, some might want fresh fruit, some might want only packaged stuff so we kind of make an order for each charity to meet their needs."

Seabright said so far they had rescued more than 600kg of food.

To find out more about Kaivolution or to inquire about volunteering, contact the Waikato Environment Centre at www.envirocentre.org.nz or phone 839-4452.