I volunteer at a food bank, and the company that sends us our food decides what we get. Last Tuesday they sent so much produce we could not fit it all into fridges. We were trying to give away cases of the food on Wednesday, but people were turning it down because they had no place to store a case of tomatoes, or cauliflower. This was what we had left after last Wednesday's morning give away. Not pictured the 5000lbs of watermelons, the 2500lbs of onions (those will last a lot longer).
The company that supplies us wants to move from sending shipments every other week, to once a month. This would cause even more no produce loss.
It is so frustrating to have all this food for it to go bad. Even if we got the same volume of produce, but there was variation in what it is we could give it away easier.
Edit: I posted this in a comment.
Because of bureaucracy we have to request this. If it is found out we are giving away the food to unapproved recipients we can lose all of our funding. If we give to unapproved recipients and they in turn give us prepared food to give out, that is okay.
Word got out that we were loading up my pickup with food and taking it to the homeless camps. I did get a number of them to start coming to the bank to get food. But it was easier when I could take stuff to them.
We are not allowed to simply give it out to anyone. This is not like a church pantry where all of the food is donated by the community and's parishioners. There is government funding, as well as private businesses, which I am guessing get their money back from the government for funding this. If we could simply give it to anyone we would not be in this situation.
I worked in the produce department at Jewel-Osco for some time. It was when I peaked in life. We never gave food away to anyone. It was either sold or found its way into the trash compactor. Kinda sad to waste so much food. But I was so lost in the produce sauce that I couldnt even process it
This is because if something goes bad from the food you give away the business will get sued for not having cold chain verification or a quality department to make sure the food was not altered in any way. Warehouses (aka 'distribution centers') typically have that kind of process, but retailers do not as Quality department employee salaries are typically several times what retail employees make, and often substantially higher than department managers, shift managers, and other low level retail management roles.