Tag along with the Calgary Food Bank for a 'food gleaning' pickup

Bob Taverner backs a Calgary Food Bank truck down into the loading bay at a southwest London Drugs.

Unlike all the other trucks that pull in here, Taverner isn't here to drop anything off. He's here for his weekly pickup.

"I come here every Friday and take away about 100 to 150 pounds of food every time," hesays, once inside the building.

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The boxes are all piled up for him; inside one is a collection of protein bars that are too near expiry to be sold on the shelves and some already expired coffee. A bag of combs with the seal broken sits in there, too.

Local businesses scrape shelves for donations to the Calgary Food Bank

8 years ago

Duration 0:29

Did you know that 80 per cent of food given to the Calgary Food Bank almost 6,000,000 kg a year comes from food retailers and manufacturers? It's called "food gleaning" and CBC Calgary tagged along with a driver on his regular pickup.

Most people know the food bank from those cardboard donation boxes you see outside your grocery store and at your kid's school.

But the vast majority of what's collected actually comes from food retailers and manufacturers.

'Gleaning' rescues food that would land in landfill

It's called "food gleaning" rescuing perfectly decent food that would otherwise go to the landfill.

We're not talking about dumpster-diving here just taking food that regular stores won't sell and giving it to needy families.

Shawna Ogston with the Calgary Food Bankremembers a day recently when a delivery van had a truckload of yogurt that had gotten too cold for the grocery store to accept it yogurt separates when it gets too cold.So the driver dropped it all off at the food bank.

"It was perfectly fine," saysOgston. "It just needed to be stirred a bit."

Ogstonsays 80 per centof the food bank's donationscomes from the 434 food companies they partner with. That leads to almost 6,000,000 kilograms of food a year.

It's nothing new for the food bank.

"Though zero food waste is a sexy term these days, we've been doing it since our inception," says Ogston.

The food bank can give away food that stores won't sell. For example, packaged food that is less than two years past its due date (excluding juice and canned tomatoes) has been deemed safe by health authorities, and is given away.

Taverner also does a regular pick-up at Safeway, where he leaves with trays of day-old bread.

It's bread that will be in someone else's kitchen by nightfall.

"Sometimes within the hour but normally the bread we pick up at Safeway would normally be in the system or in the hands of the people that need it, within the day."

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