What to Expect in Your Loop Loads

Hurray! You’re new to the Loop program and are excitedly awaiting your first pickup, so what should you expect and what should you accept?

Well, there are a number of ways that stores move food – selling fresh food, giving food to local charities, offering food to our Loop farms, and sending food to the landfill. There are qualifiers for each of these outcomes that we’d like to share with you so that you know what you can expect for the loads that you’ll pick up, and what you may get from time to time that would be a reason to call us to help.

Sellable Foods

This is an easy one, sellable food is any food that’s fresh, before its expiry date, and looks ‘perfect’. This is obviously how grocery stores make their money and they aim for all the food they receive from suppliers to fall into this category. Whatever doesn’t fit this category moves on to the following:

Charity Loads

Food that gets offered to charity is still edible for humans, so it might be slightly bruised, wilted, or dented, but still within best-before dates and fresh. It may be food that they have an excess of, got damaged, or it may be items they can’t use. Loop works with stores and charities to ensure that charities only get the food that they actually need so that charities aren’t responsible for disposal costs of food they can’t use, and the food they receive can be used right away to feed people in your community. Anything that doesn’t get used moves to the next step…

Loop Pickup Loads

OK, so what does a normal Loop pickup include? Well, potentially lots of things! The items you receive are about to pass the best-before date (or may already have by a day or two), they are imperfect to the point that people wouldn’t buy them but still good for your animals to eat. They are damaged in some way, have some minor rotten bits (like a melon with soft spots, or a cucumber with a soft end), are dented cans or boxes, are items that the stores have an excess of (pumpkins after Halloween!) or things that they just can’t sell.

You’ll get boxes of produce that might have some slightly squished tomatoes, some containers of raspberries that include one or two fuzzy berries, mushrooms that have browned, lettuce that has wilted, some fun vegetables and fruits from faraway places that you might never have encountered before, and lots of produce that is perfectly fine – and perfectly delicious to all your animals!

You might sometimes get boxes filled with deli products, including deli meat ends (sometimes even whole chunks of meat), noodles, samosas, pre-made salads, and chicken bones. As long as nothing has rotted, or mixed meat with other things, it’s great to feed to your animals. Sort the meat out for your dogs and cats, and the rest for your other animals (make a stock with the chicken bones and mix it with rice and vegetables for your dogs!).

Any other meat you get, like steaks, fish, and chicken, should also be within a couple of days of their expiry date, and look good. You may want to cook these before feeding your dogs and cats, simply because they sometimes prefer to eat them that way, but should usually be fine to feed them as is.

Bread – you’ll get lots of it! It’s most likely just a little stale or the store had too much of it, so it’ll be a great treat for your animals. Soaking it in soups, stocks, milk, or other liquid you get from Loop is a great way to use up liquids.

Grocery items can include boxes of cereal (maybe a bit squashed on one side or ripped), dented cans of soup or beans, cookies, bags of flour, pasta, coffee, sauces, and lots of other items you’d see on the shelves in the middle of the grocery store. Again, everything should be in reasonably good shape. Look up ways to feed these items to animals or use them on your farm (coffee can be great for plants, for example).

You may find paper towels or gloves amongst the items you receive sometimes – this happens during the sort that the store employees do to prepare your load, and you can just compost or throw these away.

Other items you get can seem a little random, our Loop farms have reported getting some fun or useful items like toys, toilet paper, headphones, decks of cards, decorations, wooden spoons… anything that stores tend to sell at the end of aisles, at tills, or down the specialty or seasonal item aisles. Lucky you!

Compostable Items

Occasionally you might find fully rotten items in amongst the other wonderful things you get from Loop, or there may be products you just can’t feed your animals (maybe they don’t like cauliflower!). That’s okay! Have a couple of bins that you can throw these items into when you sort, then add it all to your compost pile to create absolutely glorious compost that will enrich your garden next year.

Unacceptable Loads

Now, there can sometimes be mistakes made and you may open one of your boxes to find… yikes! Broken glass, lots of rot, garbage, or items that are in no way appropriate for farm animals, pets, or compost (giant boxes of hand sanitizer, anyone?).

These may have mistakenly been added to the Loop pickup instead of the waste disposal pickup, or perhaps the new employee hasn’t been trained yet - either way, it’s an opportunity for our Loop community of farms, stores, and Loop employees to come together and learn from the experience.

If you notice issues at the loading dock, stay friendly and give us a call while you’re there. If you don’t catch the problem until you get home, don’t worry just call us and we’ll help out. Either way, be sure to take LOTS of pictures so that we can share them with the store to help educate them about how to sort properly.

If you’ve received items in your load that you’re not sure of, know that you can always give us a call to figure it out - 1 (778) 949-8003 – and again, always take pictures so we can take a look. Another resource for information on loads and sorting is your regional Facebook group, find it and follow, then ask questions and take a look at past posts for great ideas and support.

Finally, follow us on Instagram, our public Facebook page, and Twitter!