Rescuing good quality food from waste

The organisation’s mission is to help Aotearoa New Zealand’s population become 100 per cent food secure, ensuring every man, woman and child has access to enough good, nutritious food each and every day. 

In 2020 KiwiHarvest was granted $153,000 in funding from the Waste Minimisation Fund to support the fit out and expansion of Kiwi Harvest’s food rescue and redistribution branches in Dunedin, Queenstown and North Shore Auckland.  

The aim of the funding was to increase the volume of food rescued and distributed to social service organisations who work in communities, thereby decreasing food waste and addressing the systemic food poverty crisis in Aotearoa.

The funding has enabled KiwiHarvest's Auckland’s main branch to increase capacity for food rescue well beyond targets set for the 12-month project. The amount of food rescued was 1311 tonnes while the target was to rescue 175 tonnes of food.

According to KiwiHarvest’s latest annual report (to end of March 2022), the total food rescued in the 2021 financial year was 2,114,096 kilograms and in the 2022 financial year it was 1,792,929 kilograms.

Find out more on the KiwiHarvest website

Reducing food waste has positive environmental, social, and economic outcomes. Nine per cent of New Zealand's biogenic methane emissions and four per cent of our total greenhouse gas emissions are from food and organic waste. This includes emissions in the food production process and from the decomposition of food waste in landfill.

Find out more on the Government's action on reducing food waste