Starting today, transit commuters in Metro Vancouver can start their days with a healthy kick now that the Greater Vancouver Food Bank has set up vending machines selling bottles of cold-pressed juice and bags of freeze dried fruit at select SkyTrain stations.
The collaborative initiative taps into what David Long, CEO of the charitable organization, calls an “abundance of food” in the province where there are “about 150 million pounds of surplus fruit” each year.
By using TransLink’s ridership—nearly half a million people a week—local food security is getting a boost through the installation of the fresh-food vending machines at select SkyTrain stations, as proceeds are directed back to the food bank. The vending machines appear at Burnaby’s Patterson and Joyce-Collingwood SkyTrain stations, as well as 29th Avenue Station in Vancouver.
“I think everybody’s fed up hearing me say there’s no shortage of food, there’s a distribution problem,” says Long with a laugh. “This [idea] came about 18 months ago when my director of operations was on vacation and I took a donation of about half a million pounds of apples from a grading facility in the Okanagan. We had so many apples, we didn’t know what to do with them. We couldn’t give them out to people. Every family was getting about 10 pounds of apples, and we still had more. So we decided to juice it; we started juicing surplus apples and then Mandarin oranges. This next step is about making it available to to the public.”
TransLink sees the collaboration as a natural extension of its role in the region, using its high-foot-traffic stations to support community organizations in a tangible way.
“We always look for opportunities to partner with community organizations that are doing good things,” says TransLink CEO Kevin Quinn. “We saw an opportunity here for partnership to put these vending machines in our stations and there’s a real opportunity here for these proceeds from these vending machines to go back to the food bank.”
As for the reasons behind outfitting just three SkyTrain stations with vending machines so far, TransLink and the food bank are both thinking strategically.
“Vancouver and Burnaby are the two largest catchment areas for the food bank. It’s where they often have the most demand for their warehouses,” says TransLink media relations lead Jawn Jang. On the transit side, Joyce-Collingwood was the seventh-busiest station in the network last year. There are a total of 54 SkyTrain stations between the Expo Line, Millennium Line and the Canada Line.
As part of the initiative to save fresh food, the food bank has freeze-dried “every kind of fruit you can think of,” like blueberries, pears and even an entire apricot orchard after a hailstorm left the fruit dimpled and unsellable. Today, blueberries and dried “apple fries” are available in the vending machines, along with fresh-pressed apple juice and Mandarin juice. The items in the vending machines will change seasonally, depending on what the food bank finds in surplus.
