Our van is on the road all day. First of all, it drives around in the mornings and goes to the local grocery stores, as I mentioned. Other food producers will call us, or farmers will call us if they have a glut. Especially during the summertime, we would drive by several farms as well and pick up whatever they weren't able to sell, and we'd give tax receipts for that.
Then it comes back to.... Right now, because of COVID, it's back in our central location. If we were using a warehouse...so it's a bit chaotic, to be honest, because it's a shared space. It's all sorted. We do get some that is compost, so we work with farmers and we also distribute anything that's not edible. Then everything else is distributed. We have 25 local food organizations, The Salvation Army, food banks and shelters. The temporary housing sites we're working with right now all get boxes every day. Again, anything that is not quite up to par is turned into Meals on Wheels.
We also process frozen meals that we sell in our low-cost grocery store. One of our suppliers does allow us to sell the food, so we do sell the food as a social enterprise, and that pays for staffing to operate a food store. Through that, we distribute about 10,000 dollars' worth of food in a coupon. People can still come in and shop, but they're on a list, so they're not actually giving us money. That is a very, very critical program since COVID. We started it for two months and now we're however many months in, but it is expensive. Some of the food is purchased by folks in the community. We have 100 families in that program right now.
The food really gets around. Nothing goes to waste. Anything we can't use gets picked up by farmers.