• Partnership
  • Sustainability

Food rescue: helping those in need and the environment

Published 18 December 2024
Our partnership with Port Phillip Community Group is helping our traders avoid food waste and support those in need.

As their name conveys, fresh is important to Chris and the team at The Fresh Pasta Shop. Made onsite, their pasta and sauces provide a quality, restaurant-at-home experience that keeps customers coming back week after week for their carb fix. When Sunday closing rolls around, there’s often some stock left in the fridges that hasn’t sold – it’s still perfectly edible, but by the time the Market reopens on Wednesday, it will no longer meet the quality that their business is known for. Just the thought of having to throw away this food breaks Chris’s heart, but thanks to the Market’s partnership with Port Phillip Community Group (PPCG) she doesn’t have to.

Every Sunday at closing time, a group of volunteers from the PPCG head to the Market, don their fluoro vests and head around to visit the Market’s traders. From fruit and veg to bread, milk and meat, they load their trolleys with food that would otherwise have gone to waste and instead distribute it to those in need.

With the cost-of-living crisis and homelessness on the rise, the work of the PPCG is more important than ever. The food donated each week from the Market’s traders helps the PPCG to deliver two programs that provide critical support for the local community.

Their Share the Food program provides food staples, toiletries and hygiene products to people facing financial hardship. Food relief packs are made in accordance with family size, cooking facilities and dietary requirements and then delivered by partner organisations to people in rooming houses and crisis accommodation. 

They also provide a Social Meals program, where PPCG staff and volunteers head out to a local rooming house every week to cook up a communal feast for the residents. In addition to providing food, these meals also bring people together and help foster connection. 59% of residents said that they have met someone new through a Social Meal at their rooming house. Neighbours who know each other can support each other, and they are much less likely to feel isolated and alone. 

The Market is incredibly proud to both be in partnership with such an important local organisation. If you are interested in volunteering for one of the programs or other ways you can support the organisation, you can find out more here.

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