Montreal food bank’s new kitchen to turn wasted food into nutritious meals

Food waste is a global problem.

“Studies show that between a third and forty per cent of all the food is wasted between the field and the plate,” said Richard Daneau, executive director of Moisson Montreal, Canada’s largest food bank.

READ MORE: NDG Food Depot holds annual food drive

Moisson Montreal has been working with a group of community organizations in Montreal trying to find solutions to the problem of food waste.  Last December, Montreal’s 375th-anniversary committee donated $740,000 to help Moisson Montreal preserve food.

Donated fruits and vegetables are often already aged when they get them and don’t have a long shelf life.

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“So those vegetables that are aged if we are able to cook them and stop the aging process,” says Daneau.

“We’re going to make sure that they’re not wasted.”

Daneau says Moisson Montreal plans to build a kitchen on its premises.

After the food is cooked it will be frozen, packaged and given to the various food banks, like the NDG Food Depot.

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“We can distribute what they’re giving us on top of what we already purchase,” said Daniel Rotman, the depot’s executive director.

“We probably won’t reduce the quantity of what we give, we’ll just add this as a supplement.”

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The kitchen is expected to open in the fall.

Moisson Montreal is also purchasing another refrigerated truck to increase the volume of meat they can collect.

All of this will allow them to distribute 3.8 million more servings of meat, fruit and vegetables every year.

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But to make sure the food distribution and other services are efficient, the groups are also conducting a study to find out where the gaps are in services provided to the needy because they say there is not enough coordination.

“If we were more efficient as a community to organize those services we believe we will pull out more people from hunger,” Daneau said.

They expect that with these efforts they can recover up to 365,000 kilograms of food every month.