In the past 12 months alone, Nourished for Nil has given out 81,483kg of bread, or about 116,400 loaves.
Nourished for Nil founder Christina McBeth said food waste in cafes is what inspired her to start the charity.
"There is a lot of people going without in Hawke's Bay that would benefit from that, it was a commercial kitchen, it is still the same day, surely we could find a way to redirect this to those in the community who would appreciate it."
She said cafe waste now formed only a small part of their donated food, which can come from leftover produce from stores and gardens, products past their best before, unpopular product lines and rejected products from stores and producers.
"We once got a whole bunch of Hershey's chocolate because it wasn't their most popular brand, so they replaced it with their popular brand and they had like eight banana boxes of chocolate bars and were like 'here you go'. You name it, we get anything and everything in between."
Christina McBeth says pies and frozen meats are popular, while vegetables are a little less so. Photo / Warren Buckland
She said people could choose exactly what they wanted to have from the food provided, and can return items they don't use from the parcels.
"We want to give people choice, we want them to take home something they're going to use and we want to give them the freedom to feel we are engaging with them."
She said popular food items were pies or frozen meat.
"I'll tell you one thing that never gets returned is pies. Any sort of meat product that is frozen before its use-by date."
She said vegetables tended to get returned on a regular basis.
"Bananas and fruit are all easy, but if you start getting into vegetables like your eggplants or your swedes or things like that, you get people who send those back, but there is always someone in the crowd who will take that."
