Annual Reports

Sixteen years after we evolved from cooking a few hundred pies a week, FareShare produced nearly 1.2 million meals in 2017.

Importantly, it was a year of consolidation and capacity building for FareShare. We acquired a new warehouse in Derrimut to massively boost the amount of food we can rescue, store and cook.

Our new kitchen garden program also hit its straps, generating up to a third of the vegetables we need for our nutritious meals during the harvest season. All up we grew nearly 28 tonnes of our own vegetables on three sites around Melbourne.

With the support of 670 kitchen volunteers, we cooked a total 1,174,314 meals – our highest total to date. In a new development, our chefs began preparing customised meals to support highly vulnerable children.

Our fleet of eight refrigerated vans rescued 772 tonnes of food. Once again, Woolworths was our biggest food donor contributing just over 500 tonnes of food to our kitchen.

Our wonderful community continued to grow in 2017 with a total of 855 regular volunteers registered with us and an additional 2,458 school volunteers and 3,120 corporate volunteers making a contribution.

No sooner had the Financial Year ended than we made a major announcement – plans to set up a new kitchen in Brisbane capable of cooking up to FIVE million meals a year in collaboration with Foodbank.