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Picture of the Melbourne team at OzHarvest kitchen
Home / Insights / ＿

Eighty pasties and a much bigger question

Australia throws away 7.6 million tonnes of food a year. At the same time, one in three households can't be sure where the next meal is coming from.

Marty Drill
Marty Drill

27 August 2026

6 minute read

On 21 August, eight of us from Luminary spent the morning in an OzHarvest kitchen in Melbourne. We were shown how to actually hold a knife (turns out most of us have been doing it wrong for about 30 years), how to use the stalks and the leaves and the bits you would normally bin, and how to move fast enough to feed a lot of people at once.

By lunchtime we had made around 80 pasties and a mountain of blueberry muffins. They went out that afternoon to people who needed a warm meal.

Eighty meals. In a country of 27 million people, that number is a rounding error. So why does it matter?

Well, because of where the food came from, and where it was headed if we had not turned up.

Picture of the Luminary team at OzHarvest kitchen in Melbourne

The food was always good, it's just that it wasn't going to be eaten

Everything we cooked with was rescued. Not scraps, not seconds, not the sad end of a supermarket shelf. Good food.

The eggs came from Josh's Rainbow Eggs, the Victorian free range producer that started as a kid's pocket money idea and now supplies half the state. Cheese from Savour and Grace, the Melbourne artisan food supplier run by people who have cooked in some of the best kitchens in the city. And behind a huge amount of what OzHarvest moves around this country sits Woolworths, which has been in partnership with OzHarvest for 10 years and passed 100 million meals together in 2025. OzHarvest collects surplus food from more than 550 Woolworths stores every week.

There are hundreds of other donors - 2,460 of them, from cafes and delis to hotels and airlines. All of them making the same decision: this food is perfectly good, so someone should eat it.

That decision matters more than it sounds. It costs the economy $36.6 billion a year. The average household bins around 113kg, which works out at more than $1,500 a year in groceries that go straight in the wheelie bin.

So we have a food waste problem. And, at exactly the same time, we have a hunger problem.

Picture of the Luminary team at OzHarvest kitchen in Melbourne

'Hunger is mainstream in Australia right now'

That is Kylea Tink, CEO of Foodbank Australia.

One in three Australian households, about 3.5 million of them, experienced food insecurity in the past 12 months. Forty-eight percent of renting households. Sixty-eight percent of single parent households. And here is the number that should stop you: one in five households earning more than $91,000 a year has been food insecure too.

That last statistic is the one that changes the picture. This is not a story about a small group of people at the very margins. It is about someone in your street, on a decent salary, doing the maths on the mortgage or the rent and quietly deciding to skip a meal so the kids do not have to.

Ninety-one percent of food insecure households name cost of living as their number one pressure.

Think about what that means for an organisation like OzHarvest. Demand is climbing at precisely the moment when the corporate donations, the community fundraising and the household spare change all get squeezed. The need goes up. The support gets harder to find. That is the gap, and it is widening.

Picture of the Luminary team at OzHarvest kitchen in Melbourne

Rescue is only half the job

In 2025, OzHarvest rescued 17.6 million kilograms of food and turned it into 35.1 million meals. It avoided 17,616 tonnes of CO2e in the process. It supported 1,544 charities. At its peak it was moving over 400 tonnes of food in a single week.

Since 2004, it has delivered 340 million meals.

But collecting food is the easy part. Getting it to someone who is hungry, in a form they can actually eat, at a moment when they need it, is the hard part. That is what a van and a driver and a volunteer and a kitchen are all for.

It is also why a tray of pasties is not a token gesture. As OzHarvest's executive chef put it: "For many, the meals they receive through Cooking for a Cause are often the best quality they will experience."

Read that again. The best quality food they will experience. Made from produce that a supermarket could not sell.

Picture of the Luminary team at OzHarvest kitchen in Melbourne

Why a digital agency spent a Friday morning making pastry

We have been a certified B Corp since 4 March 2021. Being a B Corp commits us to putting stakeholders ahead of shareholders. Our team, our clients, our suppliers, our community and the environment all get a seat at the table, not just the people who own the business.

That is easy to write on a website. It is harder to put into practice. So we give every team member the opportunity to have a paid volunteer day each year.

There is a version of this where the corporate volunteering day is a nice photo and a LinkedIn post. We would rather it was something else. The team came back knowing what root-to-stem cooking is, getting a sense of what 400 tonnes a week actually looks like when it is stacked in crates, and knowing that the gap between a full pantry and an empty one is a lot narrower than most of us assume.

You cannot build a positive impact on your community from a boardroom. You have to go and roll up your sleeves and take action in the community.

Picture of the Luminary team at OzHarvest kitchen in Melbourne

If you want to do this too

Book Cooking for a Cause. Sessions run in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Newcastle and the Sunshine Coast, with pop-ups in Hobart, Launceston and Canberra. You need a minimum of eight people, Melbourne takes up to 40, and it is $205 per person, tax deductible. Half a day. No washing up.

Become a food donor. If your business handles food, and a surprising number do, that surplus has somewhere to go.

Just give money. Every dollar OzHarvest receives provides two meals. That is one of the better returns you will find anywhere.

Start with your own waste. The average household bins $1,500 a year in groceries - the average office is doing worse.

The thing about 80 meals

We did not solve food insecurity last Friday. We made pastry, and some of it was ugly.

But 80 people got a warm meal that they would not otherwise have had, made from food that was heading to landfill, cooked by people who spend most of their working lives in front of screens.

The cost of living is not easing. The need is not easing. OzHarvest needs support now more than it did last year, and it will need more next year again.

Eighty meals is a rounding error. Unless you are one of the 80.

So, could you inspire your team to cook for a cause one Friday?

Picture of the Luminary team at OzHarvest kitchen in Melbourne
Marty Drill
Marty Drill

27 August 2026

6 minute read

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