Over ten years, the charity KiwiHarvest has gone from operating out of a car boot to a nationwide network diverting food from landfill and delivering it to people in need.
It's a milestone year for its founder - lawyer-turned-social-entrepreneur Deborah Manning.
Photo: Kiwiharvest
Over the past decade, KiwiHarvest has converted rescued food into the equivalent of 20 million meals across Aotearoa, Manning tells Jesse Mulligan.
Manning founded KiwiHarvest after feeling the need to embark on a journey with a social purpose.
“So I kept myself open to ideas on where I could put my energy and enthusiasm into, and I came across an article in the Otago Daily Times that was talking about dumpster diving - about how people were going into dumpsters at the back of supermarkets and other businesses and living off the food that they were throwing away because it was perfectly good to eat,” Manning says.
“On the same page, [there] was a story about food insecurity and how children were going to school without having had breakfast or they couldn’t take a lunch or they were going to bed without having had an evening meal.”
She put two and two together and figured if she can target where along the chain, from farms to supply, food was getting wasted and why then she could reduce the environmental impact of waste and address food insecurity at the same time.
The emissions of food waste are incredible, Manning says.
“Globally, and New Zealand will be no different in terms of proportionally, it’s estimated that between 20 and 40 percent of food is lost or wasted each year. And up to 60 percent of that that is sent to landfill is still edible.”
And one in five children face food insecurity in New Zealand, she says.
“They don’t have regular access to enough food that’s nutritionally and culturally appropriate for their daily health and wellbeing needs and we can’t just allow that to happen in our country.”
The first days of her social venture were long and exciting, she says, as she researched, talked to food rescues in New Zealand and overseas, formulated plans and policies, and set up a board.
But the hardest step was taking the first piece of real action, she says.
“After about three months, one of the board members said to me ‘look it’s great you’ve done all this Deborah, but when are you actually going to start rescuing food?’
“I think that was the impetus I needed to stop trying to find an answer for every potential problem.
“So, I just jumped in my car and drove down to a local Wishbone store and collected seven kilograms of food on that first day in March, 10 years ago.
“After that first collection of seven kilograms of food, [on] our largest single collection day, the food was 41,000 kilograms.”
KiwiHarvest was named in the 2022 Kiwibank New Zealand Local Hero of the Year Awards.
Now, the charity has five branches and 227 recipient organisations, with about 33,000 individuals receiving food every week, and 276 food donors.
But Manning’s job is far from over, and she wishes to launch into projects for education on food waste to institutions, schools, and businesses.
“We also want to talk about healthy eating so we can reduce New Zealand’s obesity epidemic.
“We really want to get into the government’s ears and talk about funding support for food rescues around the country to continue their work.
“Personally, I would like to see a food waste tax incentive for the food sector so that they can redirect their surplus food to food rescues rather than landfills, rather than composting and animal feed or biogas production.
“I want to see food being used for the purpose it was originally intended. Let’s feed people first before we do anything else with it.”
The ultimate goal would be to have worked hard enough that these problems didn’t exist any longer, she says.
“I think I see us moving into working to change policy, to improve the situation rather than being the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff, if you will.”
