The Kamloops Food Bank is painting a picture of what kind of impact it has in cutting down food waste in the Tournament Capital.
Executive director Bernadette Siracky says in 2018, the food bank’s Foodshare program prevented nearly 2 million pounds of good food in grocery stores from going to the landfill.
She says the value of that was nearly $7 million last year alone.
“It could be something as simple as a bag oranges, where one of them is not fit for consumption anymore. The stores are getting rid of that, but we’re able to open that bag and give out the rest of that bag that is perfectly healthy and good,” Siracky says.
“Stores get rid of product not because it’s food but because it’s a product to them. A dozen eggs, if one of them breaks in a store, they can’t give out any of those. We can, we’ll give out the other 11 eggs. So it’s interesting the reasons why stores need to dispose of food, and it’s not always because the food is not consumable.”
Siracky says the Foodshare program has been going on in Kamloops since 2007, and she says it’s unique that a municipality has food collected from all of its grocers the way it is here.
She shared details of the program with Kamloops city council earlier this week.