Kerry Lovell beside a shipping container holding empty banana boxes. Photo / David Haxton
A large quantity of food has been stolen from the Kāpiti Community Foodbank.
The foodbank, located in the Te Newhanga Kāpiti Community Centre, in Paraparaumu, has a shipping container outside the centre.
But between Monday and Friday last week the container was broken into and food taken out of it.
"It's empty basically," foodbank co-ordinator Kerry Lovell said.
"A lot of food was taken. It would have taken several trips or a trailer or truck. It was much more than a car full.
"All our stocks of fruit, tomatoes, biscuits, flour, cereal, pasta sauce, lentils - just about everything, really. We're just absolutely devastated.
"We have two food runs a year, the Lions in November and the Rotary in May, so that's our base stock, and that gets put in the container and it lasts us until the end of May.
"But, of course, we've been cleaned out.The mentality of taking food from a charity is beyond comprehension. It's desperate and more likely addiction fuelled.
"When you're really heavy in addictions it's incredible how low you'll go to feed addictions. It's likely the food will be sold."
The theft comes at a time with the foodbank has been given notice by Kāpiti Coast District Council to find a new place to operate from as mould and toxins in the centre are unsafe to work in.
"We have to be out of here by June so we're desperately looking for a place.
"It would be nice if it's a permanent places as it's a big manoeuvre to move the foodbank."
Council was assisting the foodbank to find a new place.
"Like us, they've been very surprised at how many landlords have said no.
"A few people are worrying that we can't pay the rent and the other comment is they think we attract riff-raff, which is a disappointing judgement because what we're seeing now is the majority of people coming into the foodbank are families.
"In January and February we had record numbers of new people signing up for the foodbank and the majority of those were families."
Rotary has a trailer, kindly loaned by Mitre 10 Mega, at Pak n Save Kapiti, for the week, for people to donate foodbank items into for the foodbank.
The 19-year-old was found in a remote area in the hills of Upper Hutt.