Winners of the New Zealand Food Heroes 2020 Awards were announced last Thursday on the first day of Auckland’s Alert Level 1.
Designed to celebrate the ‘food heroes’ who fed communities during the country’s April lockdown, the awards had over 340 nominations.
Providing fresh food parcels made from tonnes of surplus food from supermarkets – including 26,000 eggs – saw West Auckland-based Fair Food Charitable Trust awarded the Massey University Supreme Winner NZ Food Heroes Award.
“When COVID hit, our community groups and businesses stopped in to volunteer their trucks, forklifts, their hearts, heads, minds and mana, which was a phenomenal response and helped us to respond at the scale we did,” says Veronica Shale, executive director at Fair Food Charitable Trust.
Professor Ray Geor, pro vice-chancellor College of Sciences and New Zealand Food Awards governance board chair, says Fair Food Charitable Trust embodies the Kiwi spirit that the New Zealand Food Awards and NZ Food Heroes campaign stand for.
“They combined sustainability, business innovation, excellent teamwork and leadership – all while caring for the vulnerable in a time of need.
“Taking a purely mobile model that delivered 121 tonnes of food in 2019 to a distribution model with four sites to deliver 143 tonnes of food per month during lockdown is nothing short of exceptional.”
Graham Rouse from New Zealand Trade and Enterprise was one of the 20 judges and says that it was “incredibly inspiring to see so many worthy organisations and individuals nominated for the awards”.
To learn more about the other category winners, visit www.foodawards.co.nz.
