The community hubs connected to the fruit and veg co-op buy about $1.3m of produce a year.
Buying about seven tonnes of produce weekly for 1200 weekly packs FoodTogether is a minnow compared to the supermarkets at the top of New Zealand’s food pyramid.
But the network is sharp on price.
In a price-check by one of the FoodTogether hubs in early September a standard $15 pack compared to $43 for an equivalent serving of fruit and vegetables from a Canterbury supermarket, Dixon said.
“We’re not undercutting as much as we were in the early days and I suspect that’s because supermarkets are sharpening their pencils a little bit and maybe reacting a little bit to what we were doing.”
Dixon is ever-present at MG Marketing sales, competing on a strict budget against supermarkets and other buyers for a range of seasonal produce.
FoodTogether’s members include incorporated societies, non-profit trusts and churches.
The centres are individually organised and funded but secure their food from the Healthy Life Trust, which Dixon started and chairs.
The co-op approach works so well other community groups are replicating it in Auckland, Wellington, Dunedin, Whangarei and smaller North Island centres.
It is a different approach to food rescue, he said.
“We don’t give it away.
“We believe that a hand up is better than a handout.
“It doesn’t create dependency and it allows people to be part of the solution.
“If we give people produce and they throw it away, they’ve lost nothing. If they throw away what we give they’re throwing away some of their money so they tend to be more focused on what happens to the produce.”
FoodTogether packs are usually delivered to the eight Canterbury hubs at 8am on a Wednesday morning and packed over the next hour.
“Then over the next couple of hours people come and pick it up and it’s gone.
“It’s fresh, so we can do a deal with MG and take produce that others may not and we get that at a discount price so it’s swings and roundabouts.”
The eight hubs now include the rural North Canterbury towns of Oxford and Rangiora. They keep an open mind on who really needs the goods.
“We say ‘come and be part of it’. Some people might turn up in a flash car and that’s no problem … who knows what they’re doing with it. They may have extended family who they’re trying to help out.”
Dixon has a vital role as wholesale buyer.
“It’s a bit of a challenge because a marketer or a retailer will go in and just buy bulk and hope they can sell it on and they discount what they can’t sell whereas I go in with a set number; the orders that I’ve got and a set amount of money and I’ve got to match both.”
Dixon recently bought commercial grade kumara from the North Island at a discount to the Christchurch shop price of about $10kg.
“They’re slightly split but it eats the same when it’s chopped up so we did supply kumara to our hubs this week.”
Seasonal availability dictates what Dixon buys and when.
Courgette is almost unaffordable at the moment, for instance, because it has to be imported from Australia.
But there can be surprises, like strawberries.
A supermarket might decide not to take a risk on a strawberry order, fearing a loss if they go unsold in their short shelf-life. FoodTogether buys, packs and delivers on the same day so it can take chances.
A $15 pack of fruit and veg is unlikely to meet anyone’s whole need so FoodTogether isn’t really competing with big retailers, Dixon said.
In fact, supermarkets benefit when people buying fast food can now afford healthy produce and other supermarket items.
After the 2010-11 Canterbury earthquakes the Christ Church Cathedral Anglican diocese gave Dixon a green light to deliver produce to wherever it was needed in quake-hit Canterbury.
At that time a number of areas in eastern Christchurch had no supermarkets and Dixon’s church worked with the Canterbury District Health Board’s community and public health service to create new networks.
Demand peaked at more than 3000 food packs a week, making FoodTogether one of MG’s five largest customers in Canterbury.
Every hub looks after its own freight costs and general overheads but all benefit from an overarching exemption from the Ministry for Primary Industries allowing them to sell food to the public.
The exemption saves each group about $3000 for MPI registration, Dixon said.
“We’ve very low risk so we’ve developed operating guidelines, health and safety and food handling procedures. We sent them to MPI and they said ‘yip’.”
Dixon started FoodTogether’s forerunner in the late 1980s, supplying fruit and vegetables from St Aidan’s in the Christchurch suburb of Bryndwr, about 500 metres from where former Prime Minister John Key once went to primary school.
It was quite a deprived area with high-density state housing and people weren’t necessarily eating particularly well.
Then, as now, people found fruit and vegetables quite pricey.
The church on the corner of Aorangi Terrace and Brookside Terrace worked with a nearby owner of a fruit and vegetable shop who agreed to buy wholesale produce and forward it to the church at the same price.
Dixon and volunteers would pack it in the church hall every Wednesday and sell it for $6 at no profit. Up to 180 families a week picked up packs.
“It was a good way to introduce people to new produce too, like avocado. We would include recipes and have a little shop there too.”
