New freezer warehouse helps Brandon food rescue expand, with aim of cutting down on waste

A southwestern Manitoba food rescue group is expanding using a model they hope to see replicated across the country.

Brandon's Food Rescue Grocery store is affiliated with the charity John Howard Society of Brandon. Ted Dzogan, the society's chair, says the store saved more than 135,000 kilograms of food from landfills in 2022. But with its new freezer warehouse, he says the total will increase dramatically.

"There's enough food," Dzogan said. "This is about communities taking responsibility and solving their problems in their own backyard."

The social enterprise accepts excess food from retail and warehouse distributors bringing in pallets of items that could not be sold in grocery stores, are considered excess or are stuck in the transportation chain. The "rescued" food is then sold to community members at a discounted rate.

One of the challenges the store has faced since it opened is that when food becomes available, the store only gets about 48 hours notice, Dzogan said. This means they have to be prepared to receive it and store it safely. 

This process has been made easier with three recently installed freezer containers. Each unit can hold about 26 pallets of food, he says, meaning they are ready to react when food becomes available.

Since the storage units were installed earlier this month, Dzogan says they've been able to save more than 18,000 kilograms of food.

Before the storage units, there were multiple times when they would be offered donations like a semi-trailer full of food, which were tough to accept because they didn't have a space to store everything.

This is a situation many in the food rescue business can face, Dzogan said.

The plan for the new facility is to turn it into a co-operative where other groups involved in food security can join. Dzogan says they will receive some of the food rescued, and a space in the freezer to store items.

The storage is crucial, he added, because food rescue is often a "feast or famine."

"Having a place to hold it and then draw it down at a reasonable rate, that solves a problem for a lot of other agencies," Dzogan said.

Food security, waste and inflation

The storage containers are part of the Food Rescue Grocery in downtown Brandon and were purchased with the help of funds from the federal Reaching Home program, which aims to prevent and reduce homelessness.

The rescued food is brought to the store and sold to the community at about a 75 per cent discount compared to regular retail, says John Howard's executive director, Ross Robinson. Food is typically obtained by the pallet and ranges in everything from chicken and hamburgers to french fries and peanut butter. 

The store's sales allow it to be sustainable, he says, covering the costs of the building, storage, staff, transportation and other needs. It also allows it to share about 40 per cent of rescued food with other agencies in Westman addressing all levels of food insecurity.

The goal is to become a community hub for western Manitoba to address all levels of food insecurity.

All of the rescued food is perfectly good, Robinson said.

"Farmers put all their blood and sweat into the crop," he said, but "the shameful part of it is it's food that was going to be destroyed."

"Everybody understands that this is perfectly good and destroying it is not the answer," said Robinson.

"People are going hungry, food banks don't have enough, but this food was going to be destroyed because nobody was willing to ship it from Winnipeg to here.... We're able to say, 'We'll take care of that for you.'"

The Food Rescue Grocery Store's intervention is something critical as grocery store prices continue to rise, said Robinson.

"This has really hit a sweet spot, because inflation is going up and we're able to save and produce food for families and really have them stretch their grocery budget," he said. "The food that was gonna go in the dump that we've been able to save is tons and tons of food."

The store is open 14 hours a week, seeing more than 500 transactions averaging between $13 to $17, Dzogan says, equivalent to two full bags of groceries.

The system Brandon's food rescue has developed can be scaled for other communities across Canada, said Robinson.

The food rescue team has been working to create a sustainable model, Dzogan said, and then teach other people across Canada how to do the same. 

"If you want to solve a local problem it takes local people coming together, understanding the problem, identifying the problem and then resolving it step by step by step and this can be recreated in any other community in Canada," he said.