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Comment by stepbeek | Hacker News Reader

The grocery store near me has a food bank donation that you can put items in before you exit.

I've been thinking it would be a win-win-win situation if I had the choice to donate the other half as money instead of as an item: I get one item cheaper, someone gets a useful, extra donation from me, and the store gets to sell the other item again.

It's only a win for the store if they would sell out of the product if you purchased two, as they would only make the profit off of selling one item to you rather than two. That's why those food bank donations annoy me, they supermarket effectively takes a cut of all the donations.

Not completely true!

For emergency preparedness, I keep a few hundred cans of food around. I live in a rural area, and this is prudent.

I never eat them all best-before, and as this is canned food, best-before is not an expiry/safety date, even remotely.

It is a flavour date.

So I donate my stuff, before purchasing new. And before anyone gets all weird about it, I eat from the same stock I donate, even the day of donation.

This means people get good quality food, I get to renew my stocks, and the grocery store with the donation bin, may or may not have been where I bought the food.

If more people did this, we'd all be better able to handle disasters, and those in need would be better fed. A real win-win.

Have you talked to the food bank about their policy on past-date canned food? I know at least one food bank where they told people not to donate any food past the date as it will get tossed (plus additional staff and volunteer labor to sort through the stuff). I assume this is common for liability reasons at least.

Sounds like someone at the "at least one food bank" doesn't understand that there literally is no liability for past-date canned food. I am pretty sure dates on canned food wasn't a thing when I was growing up. It's just another way of prodding the customer to consume.

> It's just another way of prodding the customer to consume.

Not really; expiration dates are printed on food (including canned food) because customers want them. Manufacturers are responding to, not attempting to drive, customer demand.

Not sure that's true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1rZAT2GtmI

That video doesn't even address the question. It says, correctly, that the dates have no particular meaning and are generally unregulated. It doesn't say why they're there.

Hah okay: thats a fair point and I googled this just for you - and for future me.

Marks & Spencer introduced them in 1970 in the UK (1) It's true there was a survey of consumers and folks favored them, but I will refrain from posting the enduring veracity and reflectiveness of a survey and point out that consumers likely wanted dates that meant something

They are often meaningless and we can assume the consumer wasn't in love with dates that are more complex than not.

1. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/sell-and-best-date...

Some cans have a long time until expiration date, like 3 years. If the GP keeps the cans for 2.5 years and then donate them when they still have 6 month left until the expiration date, is that enough time for the food bank to use them?

When I volunteered at my local food bank turnaround was relatively quick. I remember sorting through paper-covered cans just three weeks after we collected the Canstructure donations to the food pantry centers. However, I don't know how soon they were handed out to people; probably pretty quickly (<1 week) because there wasn't much stock in the building.

It probably depends on location and population.

Most food banks in the U.S. use tolerances that go months beyond the dates on packaged and canned foods and also take into account the integrity of the cans/packages. Fresh prepared foods like bakery items are repackaged for quick redistribution. Fruits/veggies (which are a very small portion of what food banks get) are distributed according to their condition but otherwise spoil the same there as anywhere else. And larger foodbank systems distribute things to the agencies - where people who need food actually go - using these guidelines and sometimes have the same food storage methods as grocery distribution centers might. Liability is a concern, but more in the sense of distributing healthy, useful food vs lawsuits.

I have had all three possible experiences with food banks (used them, volunteered at them, employee of one) and I would be really surprised if that gets used, or benefits the food bank if it does.

Food banks have grocery store-like buying power and relationships with wholesalers and local producers, and in my experience nearly all of the food they distribute comes from those sources.

The can drives around the holidays are mostly just for awareness. At the ones I worked at checking, sorting and packing those was very costly in labor both paid and volunteered.

We always accepted direct food donations because americans are super fucking weird about donating money to the immiserated, but will also get very mad if you turn away their useless donations. Which is bad for PR, so against the goals of the org. We always accepted them but "how can we not" was a constant question.

Some charities spend lots of money on things other than their main mission. Whereas if food is donated, you can be quite sure that isn't funding a yacht for the CEO.

Don't free too bad. Grocery store margins are atrocious.

Yeaaaaah, but do you really want to put a bone-in pork roast in the donation bin? Sounds unsanitary.

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