Each summer, Grocery Heroes Day recognizes employees in grocery stores and other parts of the food supply chain for the work they do feeding families. At Food Banks Canada, we’re pleased to highlight their crucial contributions to food banking.
Food Banks Canada collaborates with partners at every stage and sector in the food supply chain, including agriculture, agri-processing, food manufacturing, storage, transportation and retail.
These partnerships can take many forms: some companies and associations make regular, planned product donations, while others make ad-hoc contributions such as product overruns, production errors and close-to-code items. Some offer in-kind services, make financial donations, and/or fundraise for Food Banks Canada through employee and customer engagement programs or cause-marketing and promotional product campaigns. In every case, we work to create shared value with our partners.
In addition to these possibilities, grocery sellers have a unique opportunity: through national-level partnerships with retail corporations, Food Banks Canada matches individual grocery stores with nearby food banks to divert surplus food. Last year, these arrangements collectively recovered around 19.1 million pounds of food from hundreds of store locations from coast to coast to coast. That translates to millions of nourishing meals.
A Win-Win
The impact is substantial for both the participating stores and the matched food banks. For their part, grocers reduce food waste and manage their surplus inventory in a safe and reliable way, ensuring it reaches the people who need it the most. And perhaps unsurprisingly, a broad academic and industry research base indicates that meaningful charitable partnerships tend to boost brands, employee retention and customer loyalty.
Meanwhile, food bankers are empowered to serve the community better. “People who need to access our food bank for the first time are always awestruck by the amount and the variety of food, never expecting that a food bank could provide them with fresh produce or frozen meats, or have a such a wide selection of vegetarian products,” says a report to Food Banks Canada from the Salvation Army Food Bank in Napanee, Ontario. “We are so grateful our local store’s management and staff for their generous support. Their impact on fighting food insecurity in our community is huge.”
“Our matched store called me one afternoon,” says Abby Mills, Director of Community Ministries at Napanee’s Salvation Army. “My contact said that they were going to close down their Garden Centre at the end of the day, and they had about 30 cherry tomato plants in pots, loaded with ripe tomatoes, that they would give us if I could come pick them up that afternoon. I did go to get them, of course, and we picked the fresh cherry tomatoes off the plants for the food bank. It would have been so easy for them to just toss the plants and be done with them, but their team works hard to ensure that they don’t waste food that can help alleviate hunger in our community. They are truly amazing.”
So once again, thank you to the grocery sellers who boost their sustainability, send a positive message to their communities, and join many other businesses across the food industry in the movement to end hunger in Canada. And a special thank you to their frontline employees, whose work makes it all possible.
