It remains our philosophy to effectively reimagine how ‘waste’ is perceived with a meaningful purpose while educating our community and businesses along the journey. Our program currently tracks, conservatively, at over 60 tons per annum of food capture destined for landfill. The road towards carbon neutrality requires matching our vision with partnerships in this space as we aspire to always do better. Our ongoing missions are electric vans for collection and a resilient solar powered building with Tesla backup battery capacity.

Weekly Care Boxes

Our priority is to ensure a stable weekly supply of food to families and seniors within our community.

Supporting our Local Schools

Local schools have a continual weekly supply of fresh fruit, vegetables, and bread to support students and schools with free breakfast club programs, before and after school care programs, homework clubs and student cooking classes.

Chefs & Home Cooks

Where possible, we supply local chef’s and home cooks with staple produce which is turned into free community meals.

End of day Meals

Our teams collect and distribute ready to heat and eat meals from local businesses every day of the week.

Supporting Tecoma Unity Church – Free Food Pantry

Every Friday a dedicated team of volunteers collect and distribute all produce gathered form Aldi Bayswater towards the Free Food Pantry. Extra weekly items are shared with excess produce.

Expanding Waste

We extend the life of produce through our Preserving Goodness programs while connecting our seniors to our youth imparting preserving wisdom to new generations. All products are shared and added to community care boxes.

Dehydration

Dehydrated foods are made into 100% fruit wraps with no added sugars, colours, or preservatives. The finished products are shared and added to the community care boxes and with schools.

​Spoilage

Any produced deemed unusable for human consumption is shared across school and community composting beds, bins, and chicken pens.

Cardboard & Hard Plastics

Cardboard boxes are utilized as community care boxes and shared across school Art departments for student Art projects along with any hard plastics.

When our free food program volunteers capture food items from across our working partnerships with supermarkets, local businesses and produce growers, we collect produce with printed sell by date, use by date or best before date on the packaging or item itself.

What does that date really mean? It means, most food is still edible after these printed expiration dates have passed. None of these dates have anything to do with food safety.

Manufacturers set sell-by, and use-by dates based on when they believe food will be freshest. The manufacturer, not the government, sets the date.

As for coded dates, those are irrelevant to consumers. The date or code on a package tells stores how long to display products. It doesn’t tell consumers when food will go bad.

Sell-By-Date

A month/date/year that tells a store how long to display the product for sale. It’s based on when a manufacturer believes food will be freshest.

Use-By-Date

A month/date/year by which a manufacturer recommends you consume a product to ensure its peak quality. The label might also say “best if used by” or “best before.”

Closed or Coded “Date”

A packing number the manufacturer uses to track a product in transport and in case of a recall. Stores often use these packing numbers to learn when a product was packaged and delivered to determine how long to keep it on the shelf.

Expiration (EXP) Date

Egg cartons with the USDA grade shield must display a “pack date,” the date they went in the carton. Some states also require eggs be stamped with an “expiration” date, which is scary-sounding but effectively a sell-by date.

Transporting Food Capture

Transporting food captured from collection points to our distribution point is undertaken either via a refrigerated van (Outer East Foodshare) or within a 20-minute window within portable ice boxes. All frozen food items such as meat are stored within our commercial freezer unit and all fruit, vegetables, and dairy within our commercial refrigerator for proper food storage to extend a product or produces shelf life.