Manitoba retailers, charities find creative ways to redirect food, reduce waste

Businesses are coming up with unique and creative ways to ensure more food products end up in the hands of those who need them rather than being tossed into the garbage. 

Every morning the team at Bronuts & Coffee in Winnipeg's Exchange District start baking fresh goods at 3 a.m. General manager Echo Shin said it's a three-hour process to make the doughnuts, including one to two hours for decorating them.

But despite a constant stream of customers each day, Shin said there are inevitably always leftovers by the end of the day. 

"It's all fresh, and made fresh every morning, and we don't save them for the next day," she said. "So they have to be gone when we clean up the case."

Shin hated seeing that food going to waste, so last month she signed up with the Too Good To Go app, which connects businesses with consumers to sell their surplus food for a third of the market cost.

People using the app will see the discounted cost and a timeframe on the listing before they purchase it. Once you click buy, you just head to the store during the allotted pick-up time.

"Think of a bakery ... at the end of the day might have a couple of muffins and some cookies, croissants, and so they can put those into surprise bags," Too Good To Go senior PR manager Sarah Soteroff said.

The catch: no two bags are alike. You'll see a general category but not an itemized list of what you might find inside. 

"We always say whatever you see on the app today won't be what you see tomorrow," she said. "The unpredictability of food waste means that what's in our surprise bags changes."

The app launched in Canada back in July 2021 and in Winnipeg six months ago. 

"We are just about six months into our tenure in Winnipeg," Sarah Soteroff said. "We have saved over 5,000 meals in Winnipeg so far, and counting."

In total since it started, the company said it's been able to help resell 1.3 million meals — or goods purchased in a bundle, such as a box of groceries or bag of doughnuts — which Soteroff said equates to $14 million in savings for consumers and $4.7 million in recouped potential lost revenue by businesses.

For nearly four decades Harvest Manitoba has been using a food recovery and waste reduction model to help feed those in the community who may have trouble making ends meet. 

"We collect food from grocery retailers, from producer organizations, agricultural groups," Harvest Manitoba CEO Vince Barletta said.