Food Donation Safety: Research on Recovery Programs

Donating Food Safely: What the Research Supports

The study: Mossenson S, et al. 2024. “Evidence for initiating food safety policy: An assessment of the quality and safety of donated food at an Australian food bank.” Food Policy. DOI 10.1016/j.foodpol.2023.102589. Researchers safety-assessed 1,222 donated food items (nearly 85,000 kg) over a five-day audit at the Foodbank of Western Australia, finding 96% met food safety standards while 4% did not.

Enormous quantities of safe food go to waste while people go hungry — and food safety concerns are a major reason donors hold back, with many businesses quietly assuming that donating carries legal or reputational risks they can’t afford. The Australian team decided to stop arguing from anecdote and measure the problem directly: how much donated food is actually unsafe, where does the risk concentrate, and what would policy need to fix?

What the audit found

The headline number should reassure donors: 96% of the donated food was satisfactory. The system, broadly, works — the vast majority of what supermarkets, growers, and manufacturers hand over is perfectly good food. But 4% was unsafe, potentially unsafe, or unsuitable — damaged packaging, spoilage, expired product unfit for consumption — and the risk wasn’t spread evenly. Most of the unsafe food (93%) arrived in small mixed loads from local supermarkets, the ad-hoc donations where surplus gets swept off shelves into a box without triage. Large, planned donations from distributors were far cleaner. The problem isn’t donation itself; it’s unstructured donation.

The operational cost was striking too. Staff and volunteers spent an average of 49 minutes sorting and inspecting each incoming load for damaged and unsafe products — a substantial burden of skilled volunteer time per delivery on an organization whose mission is feeding people, not quality-controlling supermarkets’ leftovers. The authors’ policy conclusion was blunt: donors should be required to eliminate inappropriate foods before they donate, so food banks can spend their time on clients rather than on triage. And they noted the limits of their own method honestly — visual inspection can’t detect microbial contamination, so the true proportion of hazardous foods could be higher than the 4% they measured. The 4% counts only what inspectors could see: damaged packaging, spoilage, expired product — not the microbial hazards no eye can catch.

What this means for safe donation programs

The study reframes the donation-safety question entirely. The barrier isn’t primarily liability (in the U.S., the Bill Emerson Good Samaritan Food Donation Act shields good-faith donors from civil and criminal liability over donated food — the exception being gross negligence or intentional misconduct) or donor reluctance — it’s the quality of what enters the pipeline. Safe recovery programs share a few features the audit implicitly endorses: planned, categorized donations rather than mixed surprise boxes; temperature control maintained through transport and storage, with product showing signs of temperature abuse treated as a reject; and clear written acceptance criteria so volunteers aren’t making judgment calls on every can.

For a food business considering donation, the takeaway is practical: donate early, while the food is unambiguously good; keep it cold if it’s perishable, in appropriate refrigerated transport rather than the back of a warm van; label it with contents and dates; and don’t use the food bank as your waste disposal service — anything you wouldn’t sell shouldn’t be donated either. The 96% satisfactory figure proves donors can do this well. The 4% — concentrated in casual, mixed supermarket loads — shows exactly where the discipline breaks down. Fix the intake, and food recovery becomes what it should be: safe food reaching hungry people quickly, with nobody’s safety depending on a volunteer’s inspection shift.

Source: Mossenson S et al. 2024. Evidence for initiating food safety policy: An assessment of the quality and safety of donated food at an Australian food bank. Food Policy. DOI 10.1016/j.foodpol.2023.102589.