Photo: Contributed

A gift from the Rotary Club of Lake Country will help food banks from Revelstoke to Peachland.

On Friday, the Lake Country Food Bank will accept an $11,700 pallet stacker, an electrically powered forklift capable of moving and handling loads of up to one metric tonne each.

It was paid for by the Rotary Club of Lake Country with support from 11 other Rotary clubs and the international Rotary Foundation.

The new machine is needed because of the growing role of the Lake Country Food Bank as a distribution centre, and the growing movement to avoid wasting food – any food.

When the food bank took possession of its new permanent home in January 2016, it received about 5,000 pounds of perishable food donations a year.

In 2016 the donations rose to 20,000 pounds; in 2017, 43,000 pounds. This year, donations already exceed 90,000 pounds.

Those donations are distributed across the Valley and beyond, to Salmon Arm and occasionally even Revelstoke.

Lake Country’s new building originally had an unfinished and unoccupied lower floor. By completing its construction and installing refrigeration equipment, the food bank was able to become a food recovery centre for a network of other food banks.

The member food banks of this Helping Through Sharing network - Peachland, Vernon, Kelowna, Lake Country, Lumby, Cherryville, Revelstoke and Salmon Arm - all now have refrigeration vehicles, thanks to a grant from Food Banks B.C.

The food recovery centre in the Lake Country Food Bank will be independently accessible to them, any time, any day of the week. They can pick up supplies; they can drop off supplies to be passed on to other food banks.

Last year, the Vernon Food Bank got a donation of too many eggs for them to deal with. Vernon sent the extra eggs to Lake Country, which made them available to all other food banks in their network.

The new pallet stacker will make it possible for the Lake Country Food Bank’s regular volunteers to handle tonnes of deliveries without risk or injury.

The volume of donations has soared largely because Save-On Foods has committed to zero waste. Any perishable foods that can’t be sold immediately are given to the food bank.

Nothing gets thrown out.

Usable produce goes immediately to local patrons of the Food Bank, or gets shipped out to other food banks. There’s nothing wrong with the fruit and vegetables – they’ve simply grown riper than what customers typically prefer to buy in the store.

Any unusable produce goes to farmers feeding livestock.

“Very little goes into compost,” manager Joy Paxton says.