Danielle LeGallais knows what it's like to face food insecurity.
"It was hard for those seven years. The long-term effects it had on me and my family is why I have this fire burning in my stomach," she said.
LeGallais shared her story to the second ever summit on food waste in Wellington, an event geared to get decision-makers, consumers and entrepreneurs all collaborating to tackle the issue.
Former Labour Minister Iain Lees-Galloway, who now holds a role with the Aotearoa Food Rescue Alliance says, "you've got lots of different people who are trying to tackle food waste in different ways, they're tackling it at different points in the supply chain, they've got different kinds of solutions. And so this is a really great opportunity for us to talk about how we can integrate those different solutions, and work together to tackle what is one of our largest environmental challenges."
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"It's enormous actually. And lots of people are working hard to reduce food waste but the truth is at every point in the food production system there is leakage," says Lees-Galloway.
The worst culprit among our binned foods is bread, with more than 15,000 tonnes wasted last year, which is why Diane and her team at Rescued Kitchen got involved in the battle against waste.
She says: "We're rescuing (bread) before its best before date, we then process that back into what we call rescued bread flour, and we're using that in a range of new innovative products, all starting from a baking mix."
"Our goal is any product that's currently made from flour, we can actually make from rescued bread. So in a circular economy terms, we're actually a smart material. So we're pretty excited about that."
Wendy Zhou and her company Perfectly Imperfect tackle food waste at source.
A recent study in the US showed in part of the country, close to half the produce never left the farm, because it doesn't meet size or appearance standards despite being perfectly fine to eat. Farm in the United States (file picture). (Source: istock.com)
There's no data on food loss on New Zealand farms yet, but Zhou and her team are already at work, collecting that unwanted produce and packaging them up as mystery boxes for Auckland consumers and businesses.
"My professional background is to understand consumer behaviour, so I know why they're setting (standards) that way. As a human being, we always pick the ones we like."
She says New Zealand grows enough food to feed 40 million people, and yet 1 in 5 New Zealanders are experiencing food insecurity. As a trained statistician, she says those number didn't add up for her.
They now have over 2,300 customers in Auckland and plan to expand, so that "everyone can try the food that looks a little bit different but tastes fabulous!"
Food rescue services like Kaibosh in Wellington are also upping their game.
Last year they rescued and redirected over 700 tonnes of food for those in need in the Wellington region. Lees-Galloway says these services are a no-brainer in terms of returns.
"We recently had a study undertaken, and that study demonstrated that for every $1 invested in food rescue, $4.50 worth of social value is returned. That value comes in the form of greenhouse gas reduction, getting food to hungry people and supporting community development."
Which is crucial to give people food security, as New Zealand ranks last out of the high-income, OECD countries according to a global study that measures how well a country uses its resources to ensure people’s right to food is fulfilled.
New Zealand scored 82.5% on their metric, while the likes of Switzerland, Japan and Austria all scored over 97% efficiency.
LeGallais, who is also a trained lawyer says it's simply not good enough.