From today and throughout the weekend, food bank volunteers are mobilized for the major national collection. A collection more important than ever as precariousness increases.
Sound No. 1 – The Food Bank's big collection starts today in 182 stores in Bas-Rhin
Jean Serrats – president of the Bas-Rhin food bank
Before getting to the heart of the matter Jean Serrats, what is the role of the food bank?
The Bas-Rhin food bank, like other food banks in France, is the leading player in the fight against food insecurity. Our function is very simple, we are logisticians, we collect foodstuffs, we sort them, we store them in our warehouses and then we will redistribute them to partner associations who in turn will give them to the final beneficiaries. We are therefore logistical intermediaries between the sources of our supplies and the associations which will distribute these products.
This weekend you will be present in 180 stores in Bas-Rhin, how does the collection work? Do you have any special needs? Do you accept all donations?
This year we will be present in 182 points of sale, almost all of the department's supermarkets. How is it organized? It's a big organization since, to be able to cover all these stores we have almost 5,000 volunteers, so we have to find them to organize all that, so it's an operation that we start working on almost 6 months in advance.
In terms of the products that we wish to recover, these are obviously non-perishable dry products, food products but also hygiene products or infant products.
Today we know, more and more households are asking associations for help. Last year, the Restos du Cœur, as we remember, announced that it would review its scales because the association could no longer meet all the demand, how do you manage that on your side?
We share the same problem as our friends at Restos du coeur, which is very simple: downstream there is a real explosion in the number of beneficiaries. In the department, over the last 3 years we have witnessed a almost doubling of requests from associations and upstream the large stores which tend to give less and less to stakeholders like us. To give you an idea, at the end of October we are in decline of what we call daily collections of around 20%.
Do you have an explanation for this?
The major reason is twofold. Firstly, large stores manage their supplies and their stock more and more carefully, which means that they find themselves with less and less unsold quantity and secondly, more and more large stores , have operations like “Too good to go”, or short-date departments. This means that the quantities they can make available to us are increasingly limited.
Are people still as generous or have you noticed a drop in donations?
In terms of public generosity, donations remain approximately the same in absolute value, but it turns out that our donors are faced with the same problems as everyone else, namely relatively significant inflation, particularly on food products. , therefore a donor who would have decided for example to give us 20€ worth of products, if we are witnessing an inflation of food products of the order of 10 to 15% per year, year after year these 20€ will generate in quantity less than products that the previous year, which means that we find ourselves with tonnages that are a little tight.
Do you still need volunteers?
For this weekend, fortunately, everything is organized and it would be very difficult to add volunteers to a plan that has already been planned for a long time. We may need volunteers during the sorting period. We will, during these 2 and a half days, collect the equivalent of 12% of everything we will distribute over the entire year, it's enormous, it's the equivalent in Bas-Rhin of nearly 500,000 meal and therefore we will certainly need volunteers to give a little help with post-collection sorting.
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