A new farm to food program will receive $750,000 over three years from the Ontario Trillium Foundation.
The Unemployed Help Centre in Windsor, along with the Ontario Association of Food Banks and Food Banks Canada created the pilot project to help address the issue of food insecurity.
Millions of pounds of produce will be saved from being tilled under each harvest, sent to the landfill, being turned into biofuels, or used as feed for livestock. Instead, it will feed hundreds of thousands of Ontario residents who rely on food banks.
"This grant will allow us to do even more in the areas of food rescue and transformation," said June Muir, CEO of the Unemployed Help Centre. "We will be picking up even more fresh produce from farmers in Essex County than what we currently rescue, bringing it back to our state-of-the-art Caesars Windsor Cares Community Kitchen, and transforming it into healthy soups to nutritiously feed those in need."
The program aims to prepare and package 2-million servings of soup a year, feeding 30,000 people in Windsor-Essex. What is not used locally, will be sent to other food banks in the province. The centre will add an afternoon shift in the kitchen, and hire a chef and two more staff members to accommodate the increase in production.
The Ontario Association of Food Banks will oversee the pilot project, and Food Banks Canada will conduct a third-party evaluation.
The new program will launch on April 1, 2019.
