Imagine walking into a store, picking out all your groceries for the week and not having to worry about facing an expensive bill at the checkout.
For clients of the Regina Food Bank, that will soon be a reality.
Since the pandemic, there has been a spike in food bank users across the country, up 25 per cent in Regina alone. One in eight families — and one in four children — are now food insecure in the city. Of the 16,000 monthly clients, 44 per cent are kids.
The new Regina Food Bank Community Food Hub, modelled after a traditional grocery store, is set to open this summer in the former government liquor store location downtown.
Any unwanted item forced upon a family will go uneaten and become 100% waste. An item that most people don’t want that sits on the shelf at least stands a chance of being taken by someone who will eat it.
Food banks regularly communicate their needs to donors so that the most commonly needed staples will have abundant stock. In the hamper model where you’re just forcing people to take stuff then you don’t actually know what’s being used, what’s most commonly needed, and what you can mostly ignore.
Yeah that’s a good point. If you can’t see what people are leaving behind, you can’t know what to stop taking more of. I guess you need to generate some short-term waste in order to properly tune things as needed, to hopefully reach a point where you’re reducing waste as much as possible in the longer term.