Grocery shoppers are picky.

They only want the freshest, shiniest, most blemish-free food products possible, often leaving the rest behind.

Bad news for grocery stores, but good news for food banks which are often able to recover non-perishable items to pass on to their clients.

Now a program out of Quebec has systematically taken the “non” out of non-perishable. The Supermarket Recovery Program also accepts non-sellable fruits and vegetables, dairy produc

ts, and even raw meat. “Basically what the stores are doing is they’re taking it off the shelves a couple of days before the date and they’re freezing it right away,” explains Christian Lortie with Moisson Outaouais.

The Gatineau-based food bank has been officially participating in the Supermarket Recovery Program for less than a year. It is now salvaging around 20-thousand kilograms of food every month from 12 local Loblaw and Metro stores. “So that’s $160,000 worth of food every month,” estimates Lortie.

The program solves the problems of collecting, storing, handling and re-distributing all types of foods from a dozen individual stores to Moisson Outaouais’ many member agencies. It relies on the stores setting aside a little room in their freezers until the food bank's truck can come pick up the donations.

The trick is to salvage the food safely so that it is still fit to eat. Screeners are trained to spot any defects that might compromise the food, and they’ve turned the art of reading often-arbitrary best-before labels into a science.

The biggest concern is raw meat. It remains frozen from the store shelf to the final destination. Trained handlers examine, re-package, and label the meat to strict standards. And it isn’t given to individual clients, only member agencies that have a kitchen with a government-trained cook.

The Supermarket Recovery Program is now spreading across Quebec, and beyond. A few months ago the Ottawa Food Bank started picking up frozen meat from 3 Metro stores and is planning to expand to more.

It’s helping to meet a demand for fresh food that often goes unfulfilled. Rachel Wilson with the Ottawa Food Bank says they are currently meeting just 11% of the meat demand for meal programs.

Hopefully that will soon change. As Christian Lortie says of the program, “It’s a game-changer for us.”