The Cowichan Green Community has launched reFRESHcowichan.ca and its meant to reduce food waste.
Food doesn’t always look perfect and this food recovery program and website are aimed at redistributing food and, to that end, the Cowichan Green Community has redistributed more than 75,000 pounds of healthy food to community partners.
Project participant John Stewart said the organization has agreements in place with a number of agencies.
“We’ve got this food recovery project, where we went off the biggest pockets of potentially wasted food by making agreements with grocery stores around here,” said Stewart. “They’ve got all sorts of inglorious produce that may not be up to snuff to get onto the shelf, whether it’s [deformed] or a dented apple, or perhaps they’re getting the next shipment of fruit in and they need to get last week’s out. We’re accepting all that perfectly good produce.”
Stewart gives us a for instance, as to the quality of the service this non-profit offers.
“Let’s say…you’re going away on vacation this week, but for some reason you forgot and you went and did a big grocery shopping trip and you don’t want all those groceries in your fridge to go to waste,” said Stewart. “So, you think, ‘How am I going to get this out to folks who need it?'”
He continued, “You could post that potentially wasted food on this tool.”
Refresh Cowichan has a marketplace at 360 Duncan Street.
