Food rescuers KiwiHarvest have developed new protocols to take contaminated food all the way back to edible
A food rescue organisation has pioneered a new process of cleaning up flood-damaged food to meet the heavy demand felt by food banks and community hubs in the wake of this year’s extreme weather events.
Usually acting as the pipeline between supermarkets and food banks, KiwiHarvest have developed a sanitisation system involving a deep clean, chlorine and removal of all paper from packaging.
That’s to make sure that tonnes of potentially contaminated supermarket stock doesn’t have to go to waste.
On the morning following Auckland’s Friday night floods, KiwiHarvest recovered 8000kgs of flood-affected food from Mairangi Bay Countdown.
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That represents about 22,850 meals.
But without making sure that food was safe to eat, the organisation couldn’t send it on to kai-providing partners.
KiwiHarvest CEO, Angela Calver, said she and her team quickly began developing a factory line for dirty product to get it back into a safe state to eat.
This involved kitting out the organisation’s Highbrook warehouse with an industrial-grade cleaning set-up involving several stages of washing and dousing in chlorine. Part of this process involves removing labels and photocopying them to make sure food hubs have access to ingredient lists.
Accordingly, it’s quite an involved process.
On top of this there’s the time pressures of getting food into the hands of people in need before its unusable - often within the same day for meat.
“We've got quite a well-organised logistics programme,” Calver said. “We can pick up from a Countdown at 9am in the morning and we know what our recipient agents services are… within a couple of hours it's in the hands of someone who's actually getting the food parcel.”
But while the organisation would usually get the food out to recipients pretty quickly, flood damage has required a whole new step in the process.
“Normally we would collect from a supermarket or a food donor and redistribute that food quite quickly,” Calver said. “But with this there are pathogens in floodwater so you can assume there's e. coli in there which is fecal matter, or salmonella can develop. There’s a whole raft of things that can be floating around in it.”
The food rescue teams had to assess the supermarkets themselves first of all to see if there were flooded sewerage drains nearby or leaks through the roof.
Anything on the bottom shelf of Mairangi Countdown then had to go through a cleaning process that might be closer to what you’d find in a laboratory than a kitchen.
“It has to go through a rinse, hot soapy water, another rinse, it then has to go through a chlorination process and then another rinse. All while keeping litmus paper on hand to make sure your chlorination doesn't drop below a certain level.”
It’s a lot of extra work, but with demand for food relief not having slacked off since the beginning of the pandemic, it’s necessary.
“While it is extra steps, we have such high demand that every can is precious,” Calver said.
When the heavy rains fell on the country, flood-damaged supermarket stock represented a strong blow to something that was already just hanging on - equitable access to nutritious food. Forty percent of New Zealanders experience low to moderate food security.
Meanwhile, avoidable food waste costs the average household more than $500 a year.
The pandemic saw demand at food banks soar, and just as it might have begun to dip again, the cost-of-living crisis came into play.
Now, large groups of displaced people have put further strain on that supply.
“We have about nine agencies that are feeding the displaced people three meals a day,” she said. “A lot of [the flood community hubs] are going to establish food banks that we already supply.”
These include Awataha Marae, which put together a hub for donating and collecting food following the initial floods.
During the initial flood relief, Awataha chair Maria Amoamo said she was humbled by the amount of people who had given money, food or time.
“It’s been humbling,” she said. “Honestly all of these tables were chocka yesterday.”
Calver said it had been important to keep the systems of food rescue and community provision robust during events like this.
“New Zealand makes enough food for 40 million people - and a lot of it gets exported for sure,” she said. “But the fact that we’ve got 15 percent of our kids in food insecurity on a daily basis without anything like the floods or Gabrielle - we are always on the lookout for how can we rescue more food and how can we feed more people.”
New Zealand Food Safety deputy director-general Vincent Arbuckle said food safety was the number one priority, but working together with KiwiHarvest had helped his organisation to understand the practical challenges involved with getting safe food to people in need.
“While nobody wants to waste food, the last thing anyone who has been caught up in these floods needs is a bout of food poisoning,” he said. “We provided guidance on how to clean cans and hermetically sealed foods from potentially contaminated flood waters. KiwiHarvest has come up with a cleaning process that we have assessed and tested, allowing them to distribute these products.”
But Calver said the real goal of her organisation was to work itself into non-existence.
“The ultimate for food rescue is that everyone has enough food and we don’t have to exist,” she said.
“But that’s not the case, and that utopia is some time away, I would say.”
