Gleaners back up and running after prolonged break

By Mark Ribble

LEAMINGTON — The Southwestern Ontario Gleaners are back in business after a prolonged holiday break due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

After shutting down production on December 18, they reopened to their volunteers on Wednesday, March 3.

The Leamington-based operation produces dehydrated food packages for distribution worldwide and they are glad to be back.

“We’re doing a little less, but doing as much as we can,” said Gleaners General Manager, Joel Epp. “We’ve had a couple of prolonged breaks in production.”

Epp says that they closed down for several weeks last March and had ramped things back up when the second wave of COVID hit in December, forcing them to close it up again.

Volunteers for the Southwestern Ontario Gleaners cut and peel potatoes for dehydrated soup mix being sent to countries all over the world.

Now, with COVID numbers down and the region out of Grey Lockdown status, Epp says the volunteers are anxious to get back to chopping, peeling, slicing and packaging.

“Our volunteers are very dedicated,” he said.

Right now, they are running two different volunteer shifts, from 8 am to 10 am and then from 10 am to 12 noon, with all of the proper PPE in place.

Prior to the pandemic, they would have as many as 30 volunteers working in the building on Industrial Rd, but now they limit it to about 15 people.

The Southwestern Gleaners are one of about nine such organizations across Canada who are producing food for third world countries with volunteer workforces, but Epp says the local group is the most automated.

“I think we are the most automated because it’s a smaller operation, so we’ve been lucky enough to have machinery that cuts out some of the labour,” he said.

Potato prep keeps the line moving.

Sun photo

The volunteers were busy last week cutting potatoes and onions for a vegetable soup mix that will be dehydrated, packaged and shipped out to Africa. There are about 42,000 servings of the mixture in one skid.

According to Epp, the Gleaners do between three and four million servings of food per year.

The vegetables are donated by companies across the province that have leftover product that’s not suitable for retail sale. Potatoes with blemishes, imperfections and discolouring – still perfectly good to eat — are shipped in by the truckload. The same goes for onions, peppers, beans and carrots.

Epp says they use as much local produce as they can get and they are grateful to all of the local farming operations that have helped in their quest to feed the world.

If you are interested in becoming a Gleaner volunteer, contact the office at 519-326-7687 or email swogleaners@gmail.com.