Global News videojournalist Phil Carpenter heads to a grocery store to find out more about what made them decide to start giving excess produce to food banks in need.
Supermarkets across Quebec will now be giving their leftover produce to food banks in need.
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Food Banks of Quebec (FBQ) announced the launch of the province-wide Supermarket Recovery Program (SRP) Friday, the first of its kind in Canada.
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The program was first established as a pilot project around Montreal and Quebec City in October 2013, as a way to bring unsold meat products to food banks.“It really allows them to organize the donations in a much better way,” said Dominique Anglade, Quebec’s minister of economic development, innovation and export trade.
Anglade considers the program a “win-win” situation and Recyc-Quebec has offered to subsidize the program with $395,200.
Rather than sending unsold, edible food products to landfills – causing detrimental effects to the environment and wasting millions of dollars – the food will go to families living in poverty.
The original pilot project had 177 participating supermarkets, raising 2.5 million kilograms of food worth almost $20 million.
As a result, greenhouse gas emissions were reduced by over 2000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2).
The pilot project has helped solve one of the most difficult problems of running a food bank: distribution and management.
The SRP acts as the middle-man between supermarkets and food banks by managing distribution, storage and transportation.
“Where frozen food is required, it will maintain the cold chain of being frozen.”
That proof of concept was enough for Food Banks of Quebec to roll it out for the whole province.
The province-wide program
- 611 participating grocery stores
- 14 million kilograms of food per year
- 13,000 tonnes of CO2 emission reduction per year
Food bank demand spiking across Canada
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Quebec grocery stores first in Canada to send unused produce to food banks
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