Agribusiness Report: NZ's food throwaway culture must stop

KiwiHarvest founder Deborah Manning.

The case for New Zealand to further rein in its food waste, despite the best efforts of many Kiwis in this area, is compelling and sobering.

Research commissioned by KiwiHarvest and Rabobank found we collectively waste 8.5 per cent of our weekly food spend, and puts the estimated value of food thrown away at $2.4 billion a year.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says the trend needs to be reversed because at the same time we're throwing away nearly 3000 tonnes of food a year, many Kiwi families are struggling to put food on the table.

This is something KiwiHarvest founder Deborah Manning, who has built a nationwide food rescue and distribution network from comparatively small origins in Dunedin over the past nine years, is well aware of anecdotally — the research now having confirmed it.

Food rescues connect surplus, predominately fresh, food, with people experiencing hunger — thereby using one problem to solve the other.

KiwiHarvest is New Zealand's largest food rescue organisation, operating in both the North and South Islands.

It rescues food from farmers, growers, manufacturers, supermarkets, cafes, restaurants, and hotels, and distributes it to community organisations working at the front line of hunger for their food support programmes.

Easy ways to reduce your food waste.

This food, considered to be waste and therefore worthless, have no value, is actually worth almost $60 million dollars, Manning says.

This is where KiwiHarvest comes in.

"It is because of the support we receive from partners like Rabobank that we have diverted more than 6 million kilograms of food from landfill and provided the equivalent of 17 million meals from rescued food for vulnerable people," Manning says.

In April, Kiwiharvest reached a milestone of distributing 6 million kilos of rescued food — enough to feed the population of Northland for a month.

Ardern says reducing food waste is important from both a community wellbeing and environmental perspective, and the partnership Rabobank and Kiwiharvest has developed is an important example of this.

The Government has a range of initiatives in place to tackle food waste including improving roadside collection of household food waste, working on a national definition of food waste, developing a food waste reduction target, and supporting food rescue projects.

Manning says food waste reduction offers multiple wins for improving food security, addressing climate change, saving money, and reducing pressures on land, water, biodiversity, and waste management systems.

She says the research Rabobank and Kiwiharvest commissioned provides insights into New Zealanders' attitudes and behaviour around food waste at the consumer level, and the findings identify opportunities to create change.