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The food rescue charity has had a large amount of food come in because of the closure of cafés and restaurants.
One 3m and one 2.4m shipping container were carefully lowered onto the driveway near Whangaparaoa Hall – base of food rescue charity Love Soup Hibiscus Coast.
The containers, which arrived on April 3, are desperately needed as the tiny rooms used by Love Soup are packed to the brim with food for distribution to local people in need.
While the volume of food supplied to Love Soup from local supermarkets is reducing, as they have less spare food to give, more is coming in from companies such as food and beverage wholesaler Gilmours, which has surplus stock because of the closure of cafés and restaurants. Puriri Farms has supplied eggs, and dairy products have come in from a Fonterra sub-contractor.
Love Soup director Julie King says it has been 10 times busier for volunteers than the usual busiest time, Christmas. Volunteers from other local organisations – including the Baptist churches and Hibiscus Coast Grandparents Parenting Grandchildren – are assisting.
She says hundreds of parcels have been delivered around the Hibiscus Coast and Rodney areas. Transporting the food is a costly process – the charity’s most recent petrol bill was $1600, and Julie expects that to climb as time goes on.
Love Soup manager Maggie Chan says that as well as the people that the service usually provides for, which includes homeless people currently in the Hatfields Beach area, there is now demand for food parcels from families who have lost their jobs or are on reduced wages because of the Covid-19 lockdown.
Councillor Wayne Walker has stepped in to help and the Whangaparaoa Community Trust, which Cr Walker is a member of (and which owns Whangaparaoa Hall) paid for the two containers.
Currently Cr Walker is trying to find a forklift truck that can collect a number of pallets of Dole fruit products and other food from the airport.
