New Perth warehouse increases food donations to WA charities

SecondBite will be able to rescue more food and feed more people in need in Western Australia thanks to the opening of a new warehouse in Perth.

With millions of Australians struggling to put food on the table due to cost-of-living pressures and the demand for food relief programs increasing, SecondBite identified the need to grow operations in WA.

So, with the support of a $1.2 million grant from Lotterywest, SecondBite has moved into a new warehouse in Kewdale that is substantially bigger than the previous site.

“The new warehouse is 2000 square metres, which is five times the size of the previous warehouse in Belmont,” SecondBite State Manager for WA Lyndon Nilsson said.

“This gives us the potential to help more people experiencing hunger across WA and importantly reach more people in regional and remote areas.”

Since the new Kewdale warehouse became operational at the end of July the SecondBite team has started trialing a new distribution run to Narrogin, a town in the Wheatbelt district 182kms southeast of Perth.

Lyndon said rescued food will now be delivered to Narrogin weekly, and the town will act as a hub for charity partners from surrounding towns to collect food from.

SecondBite has six trucks based out of the new Kewdale warehouse – including a truck with a 14-pallet carrying capacity and two trucks with a 6-pallet carrying capacity, funded by the Department of Communities WA. The SecondBite drivers use these vehicles to rescue and deliver food within a 3-hour radius of Perth.

Lyndon said the WA team rescued more than 4.5 million kgs of food last year and the new warehouse meant they could significantly increase the amount of food rescued from supermarkets, producers and farmers.

SecondBite’s WA team hopes to increase the amount of food rescued in the state by 1 million kgs per year, over the next two to three years.

In the next seven to ten years, the team hopes to increase the amount of food rescued to around 10 million kgs – the equivalent of around 20 million meals – per year.

Lyndon said the new warehouse would also allow SecondBite to work in collaboration with other organisations such as FoodBank WA to feed even more people in need.

The increased capacity of the new Perth warehouse means more food can be distributed to charity partners in WA.

SecondBite’s Perth warehouse donates food to 91 charity partners, with 65 charities collecting food from the Kewdale warehouse, and SecondBite trucks delivering to 26 more charities.

Charity partner The Crew in Rockingham had been receiving around 400kgs of rescued food a week but, since the opening of the new warehouse, SecondBite now has the potential to deliver up to 3500kgs of food a week to the service.

As well as rescuing and distributing fresh food, SecondBite’s operations also include Australia’s two largest charity kitchens.

The FareShare kitchens in Melbourne and Brisbane produce around 3 million nutritious meals a year for people in need, and in 2024 FareShare merged operations with SecondBite to increase the capacity of meal production.

The SecondBite team is now looking at the food relief needs in WA to see if it would be feasible to build a FareShare kitchen at the new Perth warehouse.

So, watch this space to see how SecondBite’s operations can increase in WA and how many more hungry people we can feed thanks to the new warehouse.