The Spinner November 2 2023

President Jackie chaired the meeting.

 The weekly Toonie Quest West draw took place earlier today with the winner taking home a sizable win.    

 On Wednesday afternoon as usual collected toonies and bills were counted and collated. Rotarians and Xavier House representatives had collected all the monies earlier in the day from the different stores.  Each Wednesday Rotary will be looking for volunteers to empty and collect the monies for the weekly draw and in the afternoon at the Port Office, to help with the counting and collating of the collected money.

Xavier House is planning a fundraising dance to be held at the Canadian Legion on Saturday, November 4^th. Tickets are available from Xavier House and Rotarians are asked to help at the dance.

 

Program-chair Paula introduced Richard Butt, Program Coordinator of the Western Newfoundland Food Hub. The Western Food Hub is a social enterprise by Food First Newfoundland. Three years ago, this was a pilot project but this year this online local food shopping organisation funded by the Northpine Foundation opened an office at 17, Herald Avenue, Corner Brook.

The goals and objectives of the Western Food Hub are to build a sustainable and resilient food system, to help local producers reach more customers, make it easy for customers to access local food and to reduce the carbon footprint of the food. The Food Hub model is an exciting connection between producers and customers, actively managing aggregation distribution and marketing using a Farm-to-Customer model. The scope locally is to achieve sustainability of the project, and this is week 14 with a customer base of around. 1200 and about 80 orders each week.

The way this works is that between Friday – Monday customers can place orders online.  On Tuesday producers are emailed a pick list with Wednesday being the day when ordered items are collected and sorted at the Food Hub so that customers can pick up their orders on Thursday at the Western Food Hub office, 17 Herald Avenue.

The benefits for producers are that they can reach more customers, can sell more products, they gain business exposure, distribution expenses are reduced, and they are contributing to food self-sufficiency and for the customer they are eating locally grown and produced food.

To sign up the customer goes to NLfoodhub.ca to create a customer account. On Friday customers receive an email showing the products available. The items for the coming week can be ordered between Friday to Monday and then can be picked up at the Food Hub office on Thursday. For further information contact foodhub@foodfirstnl.ca  at 709 – 501 – 8894 or NLFoodHub.ca@NLFoodHub.

Richard answered several questions before being thanked by Gerry on behalf of the club for the excellent and informative presentation.