Guide to running a food rescue and distribution program

Australia’s annual food waste is more than 7.6 million tonnes each year, emitting significant levels of greenhouse gasses and costing our economy more than $36.6 billion.

Whether your initiative focuses on food rescue/diversion or a food relief/distribution initiative, it is important to consider all of the following steps on your path to success. For both food rescue/diversion and relief/distribution initiatives, we have highlighted several key capabilities that are worth further consideration. They may provide more challenges and opportunities along the way.

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Phase one: Scope and plan

Establish a baseline community need

The primary purpose of your initiative may be food relief or food insecurity and for others your primary purpose may be keeping organics out of land fill. Identifying your primary purpose will help to measure your community’s need and awareness.

Learn about your landscape by understanding your:

• employees
• volunteers
• cooks
• food collection partners.

Find out their:

• knowledge of food waste
• buy-in of circular economy ideals
• attitudes and behaviours to consuming near end-of-life groceries.

Understand the food waste networks, regional hubs and distribution chains in your area. This will help you define your role in this food rescue and distribution ecosystem and build complementary relationships. Also, understand how your initiative fits into the broader food industry and consider how you will differentiate yourself to the general public and potential partners. Consider where your stock is coming from and how they get to you.

Plan your program

Before you plan your program, you should determine whether:

• you are focusing on food diversion or food relief
• your product will be free or for sale.

As well as understanding your local government Food Other Garden Organics (FOGO) legislation, you should understand different state and federal legislation that apply to working with food.

Generally, all organisations dealing with food in Victoria are subject to the provisions of the Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) and the Food Act (Vic) 1984. But charities may be able to rely on protection from liability when donating food under the Civil Liability Amendment (Food Donations) Act 2005, known as the Good Samaritan Act.

And always consider your workplace safety requirements.

Choose your activities

Think about what kind of activities you might want to run. This will also help you determine your financial viability and business model.

You could consider some of the things other food rescue and distribution programs do:

• Arrange collection and delivery of end of use groceries. This may include running and maintaining vehicles or running a pool of volunteer drivers.
• Run a drop-off centre or warehouse to collect unwanted food items.
• Assess and sell donated ‘best before’ grocery items.
• Run cooking and nutrition workshops to encourage consumption of fresh food before expiry.
• Provide community lunches using rescued food items.
• Inventorise and store materials, for example groceries and sanitary items.
• Liaise with case workers and donor organisations to assess donor needs.
• Pick and pack relief.
• Run pop-up markets and donation events.
• Run a store to sell left over items.

Prepare for the work

To understand which kind of program suits you, consider what you have the capacity and community need to run. Understand what equipment and facilities you have access to, as well as your location.

Whether you run pop-up workshops or decide to run a permanent kitchen and warehouse, you should take into account:

• space that is usable, secure, hygienic and accessible to the workers
• the needs of your local demographics and key stakeholders
• shopfront visibility and accessibility if food relief packages are part of your plan
• dining space visibility and accessibility if community lunches are part of your plan
• demand and need for specific dietary requirements
• availability of employees, volunteers and warehouse staff and cooks.

Food rescue and distribution organisations must be nimble, for example, to deal with large amounts of one item in one day. Plan how you will manage excess products. Can you expand and retract to handle that flow of product? You will need to engage people who can pick up end products. Building this community workforce takes time and attention.

The peaks and troughs of food donation mean that sometimes unexpected surplus leads to less than ideal food disposal. Get to know your local FOGO requirements and make partnerships with local composters and plastic waste programs. For example, South East Food Hub has an arrangement with Reground to take their donated soft plastics for recycling.

Manage risk and maintain Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs)

Assess your risks

Understand the risk profile of your intended activities and take steps to mitigate risk through:

• appropriate insurance
• disclaimers
• management processes.

One of the most important risks is protecting the cold chain. If you are picking up refrigerated items, they must stay cold or they could make people sick. Any partner picking up food must also maintain the cold chain. If they can't, don't trust them with any items.

It is crucial that your staff and volunteers receive food safety training to understand and follow the practices. Mitigation can also include staff and volunteer induction, registration or certification.

Understand your agreements

MOUs are the agreements you have with your key partners such as donors and volunteers. They are useful in establishing clarity around everyone’s roles and responsibilities to help you minimise risk and build productive partnerships.

Your retailer partner donors will expect you to hold all the risk. You need MOUs so that end users can't sell food that is only meant to be given away.

To strengthen partnerships and ensure MOU compliance you should consider:

• making sure your staff, coordinators and volunteers are aware of any contractual and MOU arrangements relating to their facilities, tools and equipment
• continuing education and relationship building with partners. This will ensure your supplies are consistent, that you understand supermarkets' changing rules, and that new supermarket staff are appropriately trained
• managing communication – often partners are complex organisations with different levels of management and changing teams which requires ongoing communication to a range of people
• training staff and volunteers so they have the communication skills to manage relationships, negotiate and influence people.

The aim of food waste rescue and distribution is to encourage behaviour change around waste. It helps to think about how all aspects of your public interactions contribute to this goal, including:

• teaching people to safely store then donate excess food products
• educating the community about responsible donating to reduce unnecessary dumping of food waste by manufacturers and retailers of consumers
• working with retailers and manufacturers to adopt more sustainable processes to prevent end of life grocery dumping
• appropriately disposing of food items your program can’t cook or donate
• changing purchasing behaviour, e.g. only buy what is needed
• attending community events to increase the awareness of your services
• using education resources to promote the above, e.g. workshops and posters.

Track your success to show your impact. Try to design your engagement activities, programs and initiatives in a way that allows you to evaluate their usefulness and effectiveness in impacting behaviour change. This will also help you demonstrate your value to key stakeholders, including funders.

Phase two: Implement program

Run an efficient program

Most food waste rescue and distribution programs operate on thin margins. Careful administration of resources is important.

Important systems and resources

The first key capability is building a system to assess the donated groceries as they arrive, as well as managing inconsistent supply. This is a fundamental and important challenge for all food waste prevention initiatives. You can quickly problem solve through good relationships with other agencies that could help with more storage and volunteer workforce who can process the food. You could also share food between other local food hubs to even out the distribution.

Key systems and resources to consider

• A warehouse team to sort, stock and distribute goods.
• Health and safety equipment for your staff, for example heavy lifting equipment and personal protective equipment (PPE) gear for your volunteers, such as gloves.
• A stock and inventory system to keep track of food made and donated to demonstrate value of your waste prevention activity.
• A sound business and marketing plan, and a budget.
• A plan for managing soft plastic waste coming from suppliers. Check with your local council for options, or consider programs like Reground, which collects for a fee, and Cirque Du Soil, which collects in the City of Yarra.

Looking after your partners and customers

Manage your stakeholders and corporate partners well to ensure that the relationships are equally productive.

Clear communication can help to manage expectations and supply chains. You can also educate your industry partners in safe food handling to increase food viability and minimise food and packaging waste. For example, one food rescue and distribution initiative ran a workshop where store managers sifted through donated waste to help them understand how they can improve their system to create better outcomes.

Build your program to consider the user experience. The stigma around receiving food donations is disappearing, but it’s still important to think about how to make it a pleasant, dignified and easy experience for people collecting food.

Engage diverse communities

Food staples are not the same for all communities. Dietary requirements vary, so it is important to ask your community what they need.

Consider the most appropriate platforms for your programs and whether or not you plan to target certain groups. Different demographics in a community use different media types.

If you understand your community's demographic profile, you can improve information about events, food waste and leftover use so that it is accessible to groups like migrants and refugees.

Set your team up for success

Your team is vital to the success of your program.

Ensure that the staff and volunteers who run your program have access to appropriate training processes, manuals and resources.

When engaging volunteers, have clear position descriptions that outline their:

• roles
• responsibilities
• required skills.

Consider:

• safe food handling regulations
• your specific insurance requirements
• what workplace safety requirements you may need for your cooks and pickers.

Think about the needs of the volunteers and staff who deal with donors and recipients of goods, and what guidance they may require. Ensure the organisation carries the cost of pick-up and delivery, not your volunteers. Supervisors and coordinators should also help to manage their volunteers’ workload.

Circular collaboration

Food rescue and distribution programs are more effective when they work together. Consider other food rescue/distribution initiatives as a supportive and informative network that can help you achieve your shared circular goals.

Promote collaboration with each other. For example:

• share food supplies to even out the distribution
• help each other with consistent messaging
• share public event opportunities
• share cooks and recipes
• provide local support to broader education campaigns.

Another key capability is understanding that your program will be much stronger and achieve more results if you identify opportunities for partnership with existing organisations, such as:

• local government
• state government
• grocers and supermarkets
• manufacturers
• community centres
• neighbourhood houses.

Phase three: Evaluate and improve

Use your learnings to make improvements

Program managers do well when they think about how they might improve future practice. This might mean sharing knowledge gained during the day with your team or debriefing later with other programs and providers. It may also mean developing case studies for best practice.

When a new or unexpected donation issue arises, think about ways you can record or document the solution so that they can be repeated. Try to set up an easy-to-use document management system so that everyone can access information quickly. There are free document management systems that you can use, such as Google Drive and OneDrive.

Funding and business obligations

You need people on your team who understand finance and the obligations of running a business. Complement strong business and finance knowledge with good financial systems that help you to understand quickly how your organisation is performing so that you can respond appropriately.

All programs rely on fundraising, grants and donations, so this will become an important part of your activities.

Financial viability is important to all food waste prevention programs. Think about ways you can encourage this:

• Encourage awareness of funding opportunities from philanthropic organisations and different levels of government.
• Record data and inventory stock to communicate its value and show the quantity of goods you’ve saved from landfill.
• Training your volunteers and staff to apply for grants.
• Set up ways to encourage donations.
• Put a price on waste from donors, especially corporate donors.

Demonstrate your value

By collecting data on waste avoidance, you can show key stakeholders – such as the venue, community and funding bodies – the value of your work. This measuring and storytelling can help you build your community and secure funding and resources for your program.

Case study

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