1. Engage With Your Community
You can help organizations provide safe and healthy foods to people in need. You can also provide food to organizations doing community development work, such as food skills training programs or social development, or that reintroduce cultural traditions to their lives.
2. Reduce Your Environmental Impact
Waste reduction can help businesses reach environmental sustainability goals. Your business can:
• Keep food and packaging out of the landfill.
• Avoid wasting resources used to produce food products –water, energy, labour, machinery wear and tear, transportation,and other resources invested in the production.
• Reduce methane gas produced by landfills. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that contributes significantly to climate change.
3. Improve Your Corporate Social Responsibility Profile
Corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives humanize companies and convey positive contributions to society. Consumers reward socially responsible firms with higher sales and long-lasting loyalty. They can become brand advocates to their friends and family.A well-planned food donation program can demonstrate your social responsibility philosophy in an easily understood, tangible way while building relationships in your community.
4. Attract And Retain Dedicated Staff
Employees identify personally with a company when they believe it is socially responsible. A commitment to socially responsible behavior can lead to higher levels of employee commitment and dedication to excellence, greater morale, reduced absenteeism, and lower employee turnover.
5. Maximize Financial Benefits
A food donation program can play an important role in helping businesses offset costs associated with surplus and un-sellable inventory.
• Reduce handling costs of disposing healthy edible, but un-sellable, food (by reducing de-packaging, recycling, composting, and garbage disposal expenses).
• Maximize tax savings by deducting the costs associated with the value of the donation (as a business loss or write off)
Food donation is the process of redirecting unspoiled food from landfill to vulnerable mostly in orphanages, psychiatric hospitals, prisons and communities. Individuals and stakeholders can support their local communities and reduce environmental impact through food donation. Non-perishable and unspoiled perishable food can be donated. Donated food can also include leftovers from events and surplus food inventory. Food banks usually manage food donation and redistribution as non-profit, charitable organization that distributes food to those who have difficulty purchasing enough food to avoid hunger
Food for All Africa programme has since 13th June,2015 been operating West Africa’s first food bank in Ghana by creating sustainable means of nutrition for the vulnerable in society mostly children through food recovery,redistribution,farming and forum for stakeholder’s within the food supply chain.
To learn more on food donation in Ghana visit: http://foodforallafrica.org/
