Manitoba retailers, charities find creative ways to redirect food, reduce waste
Discount food apps, composting, redirecting spoiled food to livestock all work to reduce waste
Businesses are coming up with unique and creative ways to ensure more food products end up in the hands of those who need them rather than being tossed into the garbage.
Every morning the team at Bronuts & Coffee in Winnipeg's Exchange District start baking fresh goods at 3 a.m. General manager Echo Shin said it's a three-hour process to make the doughnuts, including one to two hours for decorating them.
But despite a constant stream of customers each day, Shin said there are inevitably always leftovers by the end of the day.
"It's all fresh, and made fresh every morning, and we don't save them for the next day," she said. "So they have to be gone when we clean up the case."
Shin hated seeing that food going to waste, so last month she signed up with the Too Good To Go app, which connects businesses with consumers to sell their surplus food for a third of the market cost.
People using the app will see the discounted cost and a timeframe on the listing before they purchase it. Once you click buy, you just head to the store during the allotted pick-up time.
"Think of a bakery ... at the end of the day might have a couple of muffins and some cookies, croissants, and so they can put those into surprise bags," Too Good To Go senior PR manager Sarah Soteroff said.
The catch: no two bags are alike. You'll see a general category but not an itemized list of what you might find inside.
"We always say whatever you see on the app today won't be what you see tomorrow," she said. "The unpredictability of food waste means that what's in our surprise bags changes."
The app launched in Canada back in July 2021 and in Winnipeg six months ago.
"We are just about six months into our tenure in Winnipeg," Sarah Soteroff said. "We have saved over 5,000 meals in Winnipeg so far, and counting."
In total since it started, the company said it's been able to help resell 1.3 million meals — or goods purchased in a bundle, such as a box of groceries or bag of doughnuts — which Soteroff said equates to $14 million in savings for consumers and $4.7 million in recouped potential lost revenue by businesses.
Retailers helping charities
For nearly four decades Harvest Manitoba has been using a food recovery and waste reduction model to help feed those in the community who may have trouble making ends meet.
"We collect food from grocery retailers, from producer organizations, agricultural groups," Harvest Manitoba CEO Vince Barletta said.
"Food that in many cases would have either gone to a landfill or a compost heap, and we're able to sort it, reclaim it and distribute it."
Harvest Manitoba is currently feeding upward of 15,000 households every month. It's a demand that has only continued to grow since the start of the pandemic, and even more so with the rising cost of living.
Harvest recently moved away from the pre-selected hampers created earlier in the pandemic, and once again allows its clients to pick and choose the products they want and will use. Barletta said this also helps to ensure food doesn't get wasted that someone might not want.
"So less waste, more choice and more food into the hands of families," he said.
"And of course that's also the environmentally friendly thing to do because that's keeping food out of out of the waste cycle and out of the garbage bins."
Often, there may be produce that is past its prime for people to be able to use, but Harvest found a solution to keep that out of the landfill as well.
"It's starting to get rotten or it's no longer usable," Barletta said. "So in many cases we'll get some of that food out back to our farmers who are able to feed it to livestock, and of course as well some products which we're unable to use for that purpose, we're able to compost."
Barletta said being an environmentally sustainable operation is a big part of what the organization stands for.
"It takes a province to feed a province, but it also takes a province to green a province," he said.
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