If you want to reduce food waste, try new tastes, save money, and go on a scavenger hunt around town, here’s how you can shop for strange but perfectly delicious treats.
When the surplus grocery store ‘Reduced to Clear’ opened in the South Island, the queue at South City Mall went out the door, sprawling into the parking lot as masses of people gathered in anticipation. Customers didn’t know exactly what would be inside Reduced to Clear, but as they snaked across the food court, waiting beside stanchion barriers, they could see buyers exit with boxes full of curiosities, from crisps to conditioners. People in the crowd were almost comically surprised by how many like-minded folk had gathered for the store opening, a sentiment shared by the security hired for the day, and by the checkout staff who all remarked on the unexpected busyness. But surplus food—whether discounted, secondhand, past best-by dates, dented, seasonal, expired, or leftover—shares one common trait: it’s cheap. With the cost of living crisis and recession, locals’ enthusiasm for cheaper food sources makes sense. And just like op-shopping and public transport, this cheaper way to live flows well into a climate-conscious lifestyle shift. $3.2 billion dollars worth of food in Aotearoa is wasted, and the emissions for global food waste is five times that of the aviation industry. Surplus grocers can look similar to everyday stores, but there’s a lot happening under the surface and clearly enthusiasm in the air.
In the United States, I was the Chicago correspondent for a surplus grocery newsletter, The Haul. I spent countless hours in returned package stores, evangelical Mississippi surplus grocers, going-out-of-business candy store sales, and downtown fresh pasta pickups. I love shopping for surplus food. It is the closest I’ll get to urban foraging or going on Chopped. Now, I’m going to teach you everything I know about surplus food shopping in Ōtautahi, so you too can save a buck, a ton of carbon, and even procure some stellar imported pestos.
FACTORY STORES
The Canterbury region is allegedly the breadbasket of the country, which I guess makes this city our delicious bakery! We are surprisingly industrial, and in my journeys across this country I’ve been astounded by how Ōtautahi seems to have more food production facilities than anywhere else in Aotearoa. Can you use these trends to get good grocery deals? Of course you can!
Factory ‘seconds’ are items that aren’t up to the standards of the facility, and so are sold to the consumer at a reduced price instead of being rejected and fully discarded. These ‘defects’ are usually small flaws, things I believe you can overlook. Any type of production or craft creates seconds; I first encountered them when my mother taught me to always buy factory second shoes, and it has never done me wrong. When you visit food production facilities, channel the very hungry caterpillar and lob so many great deals into your gob that you emerge a beautiful butterfly (with a more refined palate).
Here are 3 stores to start you off: French Bakery, Queen Anne Chocolates, and Gluten Free Choice & Pavilion. French Bakery frequently has specials on factory second bagels, croissants, and garlic bread. They might even give you a factory second at the checkout if you become a regular! But don’t ask for one; earn it. Nearby factory workers who visit French Bakery day-after-day on their lunch breaks are known to get slices or treats on the house—and that’s on dedication.
Queen Anne Chocolates, who just celebrated their hundredth year of existence, have a little factory store that offers a tonne of flavors and fish sizes for their famous chocolate-covered marshmallow fish. The store employee is simultaneously behind the counter and doing work for the head office, so please be patient when you visit.
If you need a tonne of reasonably-priced chocolate fish, Food Factory will give you a better deal but Queen Anne will taste so much better. In my opinion, this is a time where spending a few extra dollars is well worth it. Try their factory second coffee, pineapple, and raspberry varieties of milk chocolate or dark chocolate fish for something really special.
Gluten Free Choice & Pavilion’s factory store is open from 9:30-4:30 Monday through Thursday. They carry both seconds and non-second baked goods specializing in, you guessed it, gluten free items. They told me you can usually get pies, slices, biscuits, and muffins, and the seconds taste just the same. “[There’s] nothing wrong with the actual product, it just doesn’t look good for actual selling in the supermarket,” an employee explained, like a pastry with a “crack in the base.” Their Facebook page is worth stalking for superdeals. Late last year they advertised a series of $2 gluten free pie days at the factory store, which cleared out their entire pie stock.
SURPLUS-SPECIFIC STORES
Shortly after arriving in the country, a new friend made a passing joke that Save More customers are cult members. “What’s Save More?” I asked, perplexed, and my friend explained that it’s a discount grocer with a fanatic fanbase. Naturally, I went the next day. Count me into this cult!
Save More has two locations: Papanui and Eastgate. Mostly offering shelf-stable foods past their best-by date, there’s also a sizable frozen section with well-priced vege, dumplings, imitation crab, bacon, and fridges that are often stocked with great deals on pate, salami, and yogurt. However, use your own judgement about what you’d want to eat months past the best-by date. I avoid the mayo and instant rice, but go for canned goods, spices/powders, and drink mixers. Eastgate Save More is one of my most frequented surplus locales. Eastgate stores can sometimes feel cold and stodgy, but the staff here create a fun vibe and playlist selection—-I do like to shop to the sounds of Mazzy Star.
Food Factory, just north of the Avon River on Stanmore Road, is situated above a great produce shop, Richmond Vege Mart. I go to Food Factory for my proteins and bases, then trot upstairs to the Vege Mart to pick out my sides and snacks. I was put on to Food Factory by an old coworker of mine, known as “English Tom,” who spoke highly of BP gas station meat pies. His inside scoop was that you could buy those same meat pie seconds at Food Factory. Hallelujah, it’s true! They might be imperfect (weird tops or whatnot), but this is the number one place to purchase cheap pies, and they even offer vegan and vegetarian options. English Tom had told me the owner has connections to import-export operations in Lyttelton, and so sometimes ends up with large quantities of cheap, international pantry goods that might be a bit short-dated or have some strange quirks. The first time I visited Food Factory, I was thrilled to discover this was true—their back left corner was teeming with Italian goods. I’m talking high-quality Italian surplus. Jars of marinated courgettes, truffle sauce, 800g of legit Genovese pesto for $8. Obviously, I made out like a bandit. Weeks later, I saw the same pesto sold in Mad Butcher’s surplus section for $15 a can. Seeing this made me extremely pleased that I had bought stock when the price had dipped!
Other Food Factory selections I highly recommend are the factory second biscuits, the tops and bottoms of deli beef (frequently covered in good pastrami spices), the ridiculous crisp flavors, and variety of vinegars and salts they sell by weight. There’s also a box of assorted printer ink cartridges nestled in one corner which never fails to make me laugh.
The middle section of this store doesn’t shift stock that frequently: you’ll be able to decide week-to-week if you want to grab any of their discount canned spag bol, freeze-dried coffee, or balsamic dressing.
If Food Factory isn’t able to sustain your lust for surplus frozen items, try Frozen Direct in Shirley, located just down the road from The Palms Shopping Centre. This place is almost entirely dedicated to discount frozen goods, though there are three sections of pantry items, usually with the cheapest chocolate and fondant in town. There’s plenty of great deals for you to pick up instore, including frozen fruit (loganberries, passionfruit cubes, you name it), smoked frozen mussels that defrost perfectly, and pints of underperforming ice cream for as low as $3. There are even some super cheap Bundaberg sodas and Iron Brus labelled NOT FOR INDIVIDUAL RESALE—please don’t narc, this is my comfort character surplus store. Frozen Direct is also a great opportunity to try new quick-n-easy carb options, like cronuts, toaster hash browns, or crepes, and is the ideal pitstop to load your freezer with long-lasting bargains. Bring your own thick cardboard boxes if you have them, and stop in the parking lot to take photos of your haul.
The big fish in the Ōtautahi swamp is Reduced to Clear (RTC), which is the city’s largest surplus store by both size and volume. The aisles here are designed to take you through some classic surplus sections: drinks and tea, followed by chips, candies, then frozen goods, and toiletries. But, be aware that not everything at RTC is really reduced to clear. Some items are in their ‘Everyday Range’, including staples like flour, vegetables, and milk which they sell at RTC so that it can be a one-stop-shop. However, these are sold at regular supermarket prices, not discounted rates. Watch out for the ‘Everyday Range’ signs, and always remember some of these deals might look better on paper. The refrigerated and frozen items are especially variable here, with some brilliant deals—my coworker once bought 300 croissants for cheap—and others that are the same price as Pak ‘n’ Save, such as the premade meals and dairy items.
I go to Reduced to Clear for particular items, such as ice cream (often two pints for under $10), things I can chop and add into brownies (less-popular lollies, a Lifesavers-brand chocolate bar with banana chunks), and unique powders like goat milk, chocolate pea-protein, or kiwifruit. I’ve adapted all for my uses, and regularly stopped by to see what stock changes, usually grabbing one semi-essential treat per visit, like pea protein “tuna fish” or 3-ply toilet paper. They even have their own doubly-Reduced to Clear section (ha!), where they place items that are damaged, mishandled, or they really want to get rid of. These deals aren’t overly discounted—a dented can might just be 20 cents cheaper—but every saving adds up! Before you check out, browse the Australian perfume dupes they have to the left of the checkout lines. They’re curious and incredibly potent. The checkout staff have already warned me that if a perfume bottle breaks, they’ll be smelling it for weeks. God help us all if Lynx Africa breaks into the perfumery business.
SURPLUS SECTIONS INSIDE EXISTING BUSINESSES
Surplus items are hiding amongst us all. Usually pinned either in the back left of a store, in an inconvenient area, piled beside a checkout, or hidden in the retail section or even thrown into a grocery cart—It’s all about the hunt! I pace around almost every grocery store I enter looking for their surplus section, breathing a sigh of relief when I see it. When I moved to the country, it only took me four hours before I was at one of these back-aisle surplus troughs.
You’re going to have to kill me before I stop buying dumbass canned goods!
These dedicated surplus sections mostly feature unrefrigerated items like Christmas candies, skincare products, batteries, marinades, or cake mixes. However, it also pays to check the regular shelves while you’re shopping, as some stores have surplus items mixed in with the rest. Kosco always has pink labels for short-dated products and Woolsworth’s baking aisle tends to have short-dated stuff buried beside the other goods. There is often a refrigerated surplus section at the end of the dairy aisle, usually stocked with just-about-to-expire yogurt, hummus, milk, and meat pies. I haven’t seen one in any local New World, but I’ve found surplus sections in every major retailer elsewhere, and have mapped them out in my mind so I can beeline there immediately. Near the loading zone of FreshChoice Merivale is a great chimichurri, the surplus cookie butter in Pak ‘n’ Save Moorhouse could easily disappear, and the front right section of Kosco Riccarton had some of the best coffee I’ve had in this country (tiramisu-flavored with cheese powder—I’m serious).
Given the priciness of imported foods, it’s always a joy to find an international grocery store with a good surplus section. The Mediterranean Food Company’s can be found just before the restaurant-side of their store begins, and is the perfect place to get cookies, pasta, and shampoos that you can’t buy anywhere else, and at an admirable price. I would have never had a chance to try the imported truffle sauce salsa tartufata if it wasn’t deadstock. The same goes with Armenian walnut preserves. To be honest, I don’t know what to do with that at all. But that’s the fun in it, experimentation and expanding my palate for European treats.
Surprisingly, Mad Butcher on Ferry Road has some of the best surplus deals in town. The sourcing of some of these products simply does not compute. Here in Ōtautahi I’ve somehow acquired German cookies with Saudi packaging in a butchery—and they’ve been damn cheap. For some unknown reason, Mad Butcher excels at stocking small surplus pantry from around the world: fermented Sichuan pepper sauce, individual servings of sushi ginger, wrapped Filipino donuts, rows of British Tunnocks Tea Cakes, cheap Vietnamese toothpaste, Durban curry sauces, and American super-sour gumballs. Check the rows of bins by the checkout and the smaller mesh bins below the gravies/soups for items like these.
SURPLUS-SPECIFIC ONLINE TOOLS
When I worked at Pierogi Joint, a local dumpling company, we had one place where we always sold pierogies we defrosted for markets but couldn’t sell: Foodprint. When I worked at Pierogi Joint’s food stall at Rolling Meadows Festival, horrific winds collapsed the stall and we were forced to retreat south and attempt to sell kilos of festival-portion mac and cheese as fast as possible. Foodprint was the best place to list it. This local app, led by Michal Garvey and a dedicated Auckland team, allows food businesses to list food that would otherwise be wasted, connecting them with customers who can purchase the surplus food for a fraction of the price. Whether it’s day-old Bohemian Bakery pastries, GoodFor za’atar past its best-by date, or hand-squeezed Greenroots Juicery drinks that haven’t sold by 2pm, Foodprint is the place to find them. Currently, the app is more popular in the North Island, but is steadily growing into new communities down here in Te Waipounamu, and there’s a good chunk of Ōtautahi businesses who list foods semi-regularly. At Pierogi Joint, it was a great way for customers to try new flavors at a discount and lock in lunch options with just a few swipes on their phone. I actually only began working at Pierogi Joint because of my own surplus shopping.
I stopped in the store for the first time to collect my Foodprint order last February and happened to meet the owner herself. The more you use Foodprint, you'll grow to understand the app's rhythms and listings. Farmer's market seconds come online on weekends, GoodFor lists A2 milk midweek, Miss Bing tends to list their delicious Chinese street food close to 6pm, and Hachi Hachi’s products are always listed later than anyone else’s. I really recommend Foodprint—and I’m not just saying that because I won their end-of-year contest and now have a branded apron! I use the app because it’s a reliable way to buy discounted fresh options, like catering platters or deli sandwiches. With item descriptions, photos, and store ratings and hours, I can make more informed purchases than dipping into a grocer to buy a new canned good.
Another recent South Island arrival is Wonky Box, the food subscription service rescuing fresh produce deemed too ‘ugly’ for supermarket shelves. For an affordable price, you can get a box delivered to your doorstep—filled with veg, fruit, or a mix of both—at a box size and delivery frequency of your choice. This varied and irregular produce might be too curvy, short, or funky to meet retailer standards, but is perfect for home cooking where presentation matters a lot less. What the box contains varies with seasonality and availability, so the exact inventory might be hard to predict, but Wonky Box promises that all produce is collected from local growers and delivered to customers within 48 hours, as fresh as possible. Wonky Box has a local warehouse and staff and the lovely owners made quite the impression at last year’s Christchurch Food show—they’re just celebrating their one-year anniversary down here. Definitely worth checking it out!
Don’t overlook Facebook Marketplace for surplus food options. When backyard trees yield far too many feijoas or stone fruit for one household to consume, this is often where the surplus is posted. Although there’s no ‘Food’ category to filter, poking around in the ‘Garden & Outdoor’ section alongside some targeted search terms can net you cheap lemons, squash, herbs, pears, and more. There’s sometimes other food listed, although I once decided not to pursue 16 jars of honey that the seller claimed they got from the supermarket. It sounded like a “fell out of a truck” situation, but perhaps they were just really into honey-purchasing.
FirstTable is another app, although it is more on the margins of food rescue. This service helps you reserve restaurant tables with discounted food prices, but comes with a few catches: You pay a booking fee for the reservation, drinks are full price (only meals are discounted), and you often get slotted at early or late seatings. But when I use FirstTable, I do like to think I’m getting a good surplus deal. I’m sitting down in a nice restaurant and treating myself to 50% off fish entrees at 8pm, probably helping scarf down the final catch of the day before they close up, and by proxy helping them reduce food waste. You can use it to enjoy some fine dining while being conscious about reducing restaurant food waste. You can book tables a week in advance, and many sell out, so make sure to snap them up quick!
THE HIDDEN CORNERS
If the app-purchased bagels, defective packaging pickups, seasonal wine bottle grabs, misplaced Egyptian tea bags, and still-good cream cheese aren’t enough for you, don’t worry, there’s plenty more surplus out there! You just have to know where to look, and who to ask.
Take my local dairy for example, Bronskis on Ferry Road. After a few trips, I learned of the surplus opportunities here. There is usually slightly damaged fruit and veg at the knee-height boxes, sold for 50 cents or a dollar a piece, and bags of offcut or crumbled slices sold in the display cabinets, adjacent to their fried chicken, for $3.50.
The produce is great if I need a banana or onion, but the slices are where the surplus really shines, especially if I want a kilo of crumbled raspberry bars, ginger slices, or lolly cake. There’s also the ends of the slices, a more intact purchase for the same price, but you get less volume. But what could you use those imperfect bars for? Wacky desserts! I’ve baked their caramel slices into espresso-ricotta cake, made a trifle with passion fruit-soaked lemon slices, and topped cherry sundaes with lolly cake crumbles.
I’m a curious American, and a freelance journalist, so it’s my habit to ask questions others might not. But interesting questions frequently yield interesting answers. What happens to the last of the beer during a keg change? If these don’t sell on Foodprint, where will they go? If I bought four of these wilting herb bundles, could I get them for less? Are you having a special on anything? View it as a little sidequest, and have an expansive view of food rescue.
Paying attention to food-deal sidequests is how I learned of meat raffles—this is a frequent pub activity where you can buy lottery numbers to win bundles of butcher's cuts. It does feel like I’m saving the meat, and there’s an element of uncertainty and getting “a good deal” which scratches the discount-searching itch. I attended the one at The Fitz 2, though grumbling regulars alleged that it was rigged so that some man named Dino won an incredulous amount of meat for the minimal number of tickets he entered.
YOU OWE EACH OTHER EVERYTHING
In my journey of buying surplus groceries, I’ve learned that there is an etiquette to the hobby, and a good forager should incorporate a mix of gentleness and nuance into their practice. Don’t just take things because they’re good deals, but because you have the power to turn it into something better; these are the seeds that foster a stronger community. We’re all dealing with a cost of living crisis. There’s nothing that builds a sense of a real neighborhood quicker than offering to split some (almost discarded) yogurt or, better yet, using that yogurt to bake a cake and share it with those around you. I’ve gotten delicious shared meals out of rallying together and combining the margins of our bounties into something wonderful. My greatest shared treasures include coffee-soaked cherries with a fennel-spiced sidecar, submarine sandwiches as dense as playing cards, and factory reject mini hot dogs whose sticks were poked into each other like I had interrupted a sausage-based deathmatch.
Surplus grocery shopping can feel like a steal, and that might make you want to keep secret spots and good deals to yourself. You might be playing out a “Tragedy of the Commons” scenario, where you believe a good deal will disappear if too many people hear about it. But this notion is predicated on people not communicating, and asking amongst themselves complicated questions. Have I taken enough this month? Would I be able to use all of this without wasting it? How can I share, gift, or donate this? Food is a “use it or lose it” resource, and hoarding the locations of two-day-old chicken thighs won’t help anyone. Talking about good deals might even make them more frequent. The more people talking about the Foodprint app, for example, the more restaurants will feel encouraged to join and post their items. The more that people show they’re willing to buy imperfect cakes, the more likely a producer will feel comfortable selling them as seconds, knowing that their stock will be bought out. We don’t need to accept the high level of food waste or the depersonalized, individualistic trends in home cooking, we can make great strides in both with the simple and joyful act of shopping for surplus food.
