'Unwanted' Produce at US-Mexico Border Food Warehouses Helps Address Hunger Tobey Schmidt - Arizona Sonora News
go to original October 11, 2016

Fighting Food Waste on the Border (Great Big Story)

Farmers from Mexico bring nearly 20 million pounds of produce across the border into this once-bustling border town each year, according to statistics by U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2014. From there, they sell it to distribution companies, who then sell it to grocery stores.

The problem happens, though, when the food is not sold. It can languish in Nogales, headed for landfills.

“If the product look bad, we dump them,” said Fernando Rodriguez, who works in sales at Franks Distribution in Nogales, one of the hundreds of warehouses stringing along the highway from Nogales to Tucson, 70 miles away.

“If I know the product is consumable, we donate them,” he added.

That “unwanted” produce provides a lifeline for many outlets that deal with hunger in Southern Arizona.

For example, more than 200 food-distribution companies throughout Southern Arizona send unwanted produce to the Borderlands Food Bank in Nogales. That accounts for approximately 25 to 40 million pounds of food that otherwise would be dumped into landfills each year.

Grocery stores don’t always buy the produce that crosses the border from farms in Mexico. Sometimes there is no market for a particular fruit or vegetable, or the market is too high or too low. Sometimes the product is too small or too big.

Depending on consumer demand for any particular product at any time, grocery stores choose to buy — or deny. When they don’t buy the produce, the distribution companies have few options. They can either take it to a landfill (at a cost to them) — or find a way to get it into a donation distribution network like Borderlands Food Bank.

Read the rest at Tucson.com

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