We welcome high-volume donations of nutritious food
Are you a food business looking to donate surplus product?
For food donations, please contact food logistics coordinator, Joss Munro, on 03 9428 0044 or email joss.munro@fareshare.net.au.
What We Accept
Food retailers, wholesalers and distributors
- Product close to "use by" date
- Product no more than six months past "best before" date
- Products with damaged labels (provided an ingredient list can be supplied)
- R&D products or finished/deleted product lines
- Sample size or bulk produce
- Products that fall outside the manufacturers' specifications
- Over/underweight products
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Individuals/household
Although we cannot collect food donated from individuals or households, we are happy to receive good quality, unopened grocery items within their ‘use by’ dates.
Caterers, events and festivals
Donate surplus food to our kitchen
We accept donations of surplus food from wholesalers, farmers, supermarkets, manufacturers, importers and distribution centres. Our chefs bring surplus food together to cook more than 6,000 free nutritious meals a day for charities throughout Victoria.
Each year more than 100 businesses provide us with perfectly good food that would otherwise end up in landfill. These include Fonterra (dairy), Kinross Farms (eggs), Woolworths (meat), and Costa (fresh vegetables).
FareShare adheres to local and national food safety guidelines to ensure your donated food is received, stored, cooked, cooled and distributed in a safe condition. We operate a high volume cook-chill facility and run a fleet of refrigerated food transport vehicles that can collect donations at short notice within a time slot that suits you.
We aim to make donating as easy as possible for you.
Stories from our wonderful food donors
Why our generous food donors support FareShare
Costa is proudly supporting FareShare’s mission to fight hunger by donating nutrient rich mushrooms to incorporate in some of the 6,000 free meals cooked each day.
In Australia, Costa grows, markets and delivers over 500 tonnes of mushrooms per week. Costa recognises that there are people in the community with challenging circumstances and a nutritious hearty meal is not always within reach.
Partnering with FareShare is not only an opportunity to work with a great charity, it also allows us to make our product available free of charge, enabling those less fortunate in the community to have access to healthy food that would otherwise go to waste.
Costa is committed to fighting food waste and hunger with Fareshare.
It is legal to donate food that’s in good condition to charities.
To support businesses that wished to donate food to charities, FareShare teamed up with the Law Institute of Victoria to lobby the state government to provide legal protection to food businesses that wanted to help the community.
In 2002 the campaign resulted in the passage of what has become known as the Good Samaritan law. This law protects food donors from legal action, where food is donated in good condition and in good faith.
The Good Samaritan law was the first of its kind in Australia and has been replicated in every state and territory since.
And here are the relevant sections of the legislation:
Wrongs and Other Acts (Public Liability Insurance Reform) 2002 – “Good Samaritan law”
Part VIB – Food Donor Protection
31F. Protection of food donors
(1) A person who donates food (the “food donor”) in the circumstances listed in sub-section (2) is not liable in any civil proceeding for any death or injury that results from the consumption of the food.
(2) The circumstances are:
(a) that the food donor donated the food,
(i) in good faith for a charitable or benevolent purpose; and
(ii) with the intention that the consumer of the food would not have to pay for the food; and
(b) that the food was safe to consume at the time it left the possession or control of the food donor; and
(c) if the food was of a nature that required it to be handled in a particular way to ensure that it remained safe to consume after it left the possession or control of the food donor, that the food donor informed the person to whom the food donor gave the food of those handling requirements; and
(d) if the food only remained safe to consume for a particular period of time after it left the possession or control of the food donor, that the food donor informed the person to whom the food donor gave the food of that time limit.
(3) For the purposes of this section, food is safe to consume if it is not unsafe food.