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Felix’s four approaches to food recovery
Redirect In the simplest cases, food items such as unpacked fresh fruit are collected (usually in bulk bags) and moved to Felix depots and labelled to ensure traceability.
Relabel Some food items need labelling to ensure compliance and traceability. They could have the wrong (or no) label for many reasons – the weight or ingredients list could be incorrect, they may have come from a ready meal so were never meant to be sold to the public, or they could have been produced for a country with different labelling rules.
Every food surplus recovery programme within every factory is unique so the examples included in this section are honestly just a handful of ways food can be recovered. But I’ve seen first-hand that there is nearly always a way to get food to us – and simply too. We’re always developing new approaches and even bring in consultants from Newton in more complex cases. We do everything we can to get your food to the families and people in crisis who really need it.” Joshua Wheeler Senior Programme Manager – Innovation and Development, Felix “
Repack If food was never intended for sale so is not packaged or a brand does not want imperfect items out in the public, surplus can be repacked into a format Felix can use.
Repurpose This method combines surplus ingredients into new food items altogether. This can be achieved within charities’ kitchens if they receive regular food from the same suppliers, for example, pastry offcuts from one manufacturer and chicken from another could be made into a pie. Suppliers could also repurpose on their own site with their own ingredients, such as making a soup out of vegetable offcuts.
How to recover good food from factories Getting surplus to charities in a food-safe, practical and cost-efficient way varies by product and site, but Felix does it every day. The first step is to get in touch with them to spot common sense opportunities and talk through which of the four key methods for recovery may be appropriate for your situation.
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