This Just In: Queen Victoria Market Will Start Donating Hundreds of Tonnes of Unsold Food to Melbourne Communities
Melbourne's biggest market is keeping unsold produce from going to waste and sending it to locals instead.
Melbourne's Queen Victoria Market, with its two city blocks worth of space that makers and producers call home, is looking to shift its surplus from the skip to the kitchen table. As reported by the ABC, the market has begun working with Secondbite to redirect its surplus food to charities that will deliver it to locals who need it most.
QVM reportedly generates up to 800 tonnes of unsold food from stallholders every year, 97 percent of which is still edible according to research by Purpose Precinct. It's not the market's first attempt to tackle the waste issues, with the Moving Feast Kitchen that opened last year turning unsold produce into long-life meals and products. But this skips the middle ground, and will see QVM partner with multiple food charities to develop a food relief program to relocate produce while it's still fresh.
Queen Victoria Market
Now in its infancy, the program is operating with five of 35 stallholders in QVM, a small start that will grow over time. Purpose Precinct General Manager Llawela Forrest told the ABC, "The market does a good job at the moment in getting that into compost, but we want to see that used at its highest value, which is as beautiful, nutritious food."
From there, the produce — mostly fruit and veg at this stage but the organisers hope to expand into meat and seafood — will be redistributed to frontline food relief charities by Secondbite, whose vehicles can carry up to one tonne of food each to meet a growing demand from food charities in Australia.
Supplied
According to an April report from food rescue organisation Ozharvest, 70 percent of frontline food charities in Australia have reported an increase in demand in the last year, and two-thirds of those charities need more supplies to meet that demand. Of the people reaching out for support, one-third of them are doing so for the first time.
OzHarvest, which supplies these frontline charities with free food deliveries, now has over 1600 organisations on its waitlist, and OzHarvest CEO James Groth details that these findings highlight the need for a national alarm.
"One in five people are being turned away because the support system is under-resourced. The charities we deliver food to are working hard to support their local communities, but two thirds say they need more to meet demand." The reality is dire, as Goth explains, "For the first time in OzHarvest's history, our waitlist is longer than the list of charities we can currently reach."
Visit Queen Victoria Market on Queen St, Melbourne. To donate to support the charities mentioned in this story, visit the Secondbite or Ozharvest websites.
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