Food Recovery Depot Meal Production!

Our frozen meal production started in April 2020, using primarily recovered foods to create nutritious and delicious meals. Chefs are contracted to produce meals each week and volunteer cooking sessions are coordinated every 2 weeks. To date, we have produced over 17,000 (12 oz) servings of meals for our community!
This program fills a niche in Kimberley and has resulted in improved food security services for our community. We adapt to enhance already existing services whenever possible. Some examples:
Blarchmont Early Learning Centre runs a supper program that is highly over-subscribed with increased need since the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to accessing 100s of lbs of fresh groceries each week, accessing additional frozen meals from us means they don't have to turn people away.
Seniors Helping Seniors created a new meal delivery service due to accessing our meals. Since January 2021, their volunteers have delivered meals to 12-14 households per week.
Local school meal programs have been restricted due to Covid-19 restrictions. We have produced an average of 75 whole food-based handheld baked goods weekly since October 2020 to accommodate the reduction in variety of fresh produce they are able to offer students. 
To augment supports our partner agencies coordinate for clients before the winter holidays, we plan our cooking sessions to produce the appropriate number and sizes of extra meals needed.
Starting in 2020, we offer agencies frozen meal coupons for their clients to access meals through our 4 Open to Publics planned over the holiday period. Since this is a time when many local agencies are closed, there is also a greater amount of recovered groceries available to the public.