Our foodbank - behind the scenes

Our foodbank’s day begins at 7am when the lights go on in the big Hereford Street building to launch another busy weekday of giving and receiving food.

By late in the afternoon we will have welcomed 88 grateful clients who collected food for about 3000 meals for about 300 people.

And we will do it all again the next day. The daily miracle of our foodbank is how we keep this up weekday after weekday, month after month, right through the year. It takes a passionate team of staff and volunteers plus a community that backs us with donations to make this happen.

A lot goes on behind the scenes to keep those boxes of food flowing and a lot happens even before the first clients appear in the self-serve section at 9am (the prepackaged parcel section opens at 9.30am).

Before then our volunteer van driver may be on the road collecting donations from companies such as My Food Bag and Couplands, vegetables from the prison, and clearing the City Mission bins at supermarkets like Durham St, Bishopdale, Rolleston New Worlds and Merivale Fresh Choice.

Our packing and sorting volunteers and staff start arriving from 8am-8.30am and on a typical day there will be about eight staff across the jobs of food request assessors, warehouse staff, and food parcel processers as well as up to eight volunteers.

It’s not just food going out that needs organising. Our team also need to gather, sort and store donations from everyday people, from our wider food networks, and food we have purchased to supplement the donated food.

Our foodbank is a mini-Mission communications hub, with texts, phone calls and emails going back and forwards around deliveries and campaigns. Meanwhile the assessors are also busy phoning, texting and emailing clients and agencies to organise collection times for either one of the 33 pre-packed parcels or one of the 55 shopping slots at the self-serve that we can offer each day.

We reach this 88-food parcel limit most days and we only allow bookings up to 24 hours ahead because we must remain an emergency service.

We wish we could do more - but 21,800 food parcels in a year is the most the Mission has ever done and it is something we and our supporters can be very proud of achieving.