The Good Food & Wine Show is an event like no other. If you’ve ever been to one of our shows you’ll know it’s a day full of discovery, fun, entertainment, and of course, good food and wine.

Collectively the show is pulled together by a team of dedicated full-time staff, a handful of experts, a celebrity chef or two (or five or six), dozens of contractors, hundreds of exhibitors, and of course our 20,000-strong crowd that come through the doors each year.

We’re committed to providing a great day out for food and wine lovers alike, in addition to supporting local producers around Australia by providing a platform for them to connect directly with new food and wine loving customers. But we’re also committed to another cause.

Once you’ve sampled your way around the show, maybe picked up your new favourite homemade sauce, learnt a trick or two when it comes to pairing cheese with whisky, and perhaps shipped yourself a case of shiraz before snapping that selfie with Miguel, the show is over, right?

Not quite. As we close the doors to each show, to others a door is just opening. Enter OzHarvest.

OzHarvest is a not-for-profit, for-impact organisation that rescues surplus produce (that would otherwise go to waste) from restaurants, retailers, supermarkets and events such as ours. The food is then delivered, at no cost, to charitable agencies who use it to supply meals to those less fortunate.

For the last five years, as the Sunday sun sets across our shows in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, the OzHarvest team (aka the ‘Yellow Army’) have been on hand, person-to-person, truck-to-truck, to transfer unused show produce to homeless service providers, youth drop in centres, women’s refuges and community church groups. And this year our Perth event supplied OzHarvests’ largest ever collection of food & drink from the show.

4,700 kgs, equating to around 14,000 meals, was collected and transferred – that’s equal to a meal for two out of three people who attended the show for a fun day out – helping to make a difference to the very real threat of food insecurity in Australia.

According to OzHarvest there are 644,000 people in Australia relying on food relief each month. With charities often struggling to meet demand, there are around 43,000 people turned away monthly due to limited supply. On the flip-side the Federal Government estimates that Australians throw out an estimated $20 billion dollars each year in commercial and residential waste.

OzHarvest are working towards closing this gap between the staggering waste of quality excess food and the growing needs of the vulnerable in our community.

Since 2004 OzHarvest have rescued and diverted over 3,000 tonnes of quality excess food, delivering to over 100 charitable agencies who have supplied in excess of 10 million meals. Incidentally preventing 4,800 tonnes of carbon emissions by diverting waste.

Some impressive numbers? We think so. Next time you visit The Good Food & Wine Show for a fun day out you’ll be pleased to know that just by being there you are supporting a new door opening to those in need.

To support OzHarvest with their collections please head here.

To follow their journey check out their facebook page.