Rescued food turned into meals for families in need

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Hundreds of meals made with rescued food that would otherwise go to waste are being delivered to people in need throughout Auckland.

KiwiHarvest sends ingredients to a commercial kitchen, where volunteers cook up a storm for a good cause.

For the cook-off, Jenn Hogg is tasked with creating a meal from whatever rescued ingredients turn up.

She is the senior culinary expert at Miele, which opens its Auckland showroom kitchen to volunteers helping KiwiHarvest create meals for Women's Refuge and those in transitional housing.

"We don't know what we're getting so we have to be quite organic and creative. KiwiHarvest had a whole lot of carrots, they had oodles of spaghetti and they had spinach and chicken and onions and pumpkin so we cooked all that up in different ovens," Hogg said.

Once cooked into a pasta dish, the rescued food created 180 meals.

"It's just food that's usually before its best-before date, so still really good. I was actually amazed at the quality of the food - it was probably better than I actually get at the supermarket."

Kitchen volunteer Shannon Green was among eight people from Lion donating their time.

"People and families are having to make really tough decisions and it feels right now is the time to support people in that basic requirement of need for food."

KiwiHarvest recently celebrated a record of 4 million kilograms of food rescued in a year - double the volume of food it rescued three years ago.

Since starting in 2012, it had redistributed 20 million kilograms of food which also helped to fill food parcels.

It was among food charities waiting to find out if they would receive a share of the ongoing government funding announced in the Budget, a one-off grant, or nothing.

Budget 2026 introduced $8 million annually in baseline funding to pay for food distribution - that is, collecting surplus and donated food and delivering it to places like food banks, which is mainly done by the Food Network.

It also gave food banks themselves $7m in 2026/27, but no more after that.

KiwiHarvest chief executive Angela Calver said they were waiting to find out if the charity was among the three national providers or 32 food regional hubs to get ongoing government funding earmarked through the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) in the coming year's budget.

"It's amazing that MSD Food Secure Communities team has managed to get it to be baseline funding for $8m. We don't know if we're included in that."

The government also put $7m towards one-off grants for foodbanks and other food charities.

Calver said food rescue organisations like the New Zealand Food Network need ongoing funding, but so did foodbanks.

"If you continue to fund them and you don't fund us, they can send us all the food in the world but our doors will be closed - which is what they will have heard from the foodbanks and the community agencies, I'm sure."

An independent evaluation of government's funding for food charities, released last month, showed it had been hugely successful, with more food rescued and foodbanks providing more food to their communities.

Commissioned by MSD, it also found more than 80 percent of food charities would face "significant reductions or closure" without government funding.

It noted the rescue, distribution hubs and foodbanks worked well as a whole.

"The interdependent three-tiered infrastructure means capacity loss at any level creates system-wide impacts," the report stated. "NZ Food Network's ability to rescue food depends on regional hubs having capacity to receive it, which depends on local providers having capacity to distribute it to households."

Demand was up by half at the Salvation Army's 65 foodbanks and many have had to reduce hours or reduce visits per household.

Food security manager Sonya Cameron said it was great the government would fund the NZ Food Network and some food hubs that distribute food on an ongoing basis.

"The funding for foodbanks is only for one year, so for us it's almost like the government has funded the food but not the connection to people," Cameron said.

The Salvation Army expected its foodbanks to be among those funded.

"It's really disappointing and kind of exhausting to feel like we're continuing this year on year fight for ongoing funding for foodbanks," she said.

"The need does not go away, you have whanau who then are needing to go to those other services and yet what can be provided through those other services is also reduced."

A new survey from the Aotearoa Food Rescue Alliance found half of its 35 organisations are worried about closing in the next six months. mainly due to rising costs and a lack of funding.

Calver said fuel costs were an ongoing challenge.

"At one point it was costing us $314 a day extra in fuel, and that was when it was close to hitting $4. Now that it's back to below $3 it's down to about $120 a day."

She said whatever government funding they secured would go towards underlying operating costs.