“Our vendor said she wasn’t sure if the rice containers were destroyed or not, but the boat wasn’t sunk,” said Neil Hetherington, CEO of Daily Bread Food Bank. “But we know that they will be late for sure, if not destroyed.”
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He said there were six containers, each holding about 40,000 pounds of rice from Thailand. This is the first time this has ever happened, and he hopes it will be the last.
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“Each container holds 330,000 servings of rice.”
According to Hetherington, each container costs about $15,000.
“We usually get all of our food from local sources, but I do like that the supply chain team gets the food you have to buy from other countries,” he said.
“They get it from a lot of different countries. In this case, it was Thailand,” Hetherington said. “But we also buy rice from Guyana and India.”
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Hetherington said that the Daily Bread isn’t worried because they buy rice from a lot of different places.
He said, “So if it takes longer to get here from Thailand, we will have the backup.”
“We don’t know if the ship can be fixed. If it gets destroyed. Does it need to go into dry dock? Are they going to take the containers off the ship and put them on another one? It might be late, or they could just put some duct tape on it and let it go.
The head of the food bank thinks they will find out what happened to the rice in Thailand next week.
He said that the seller would get in touch with him next week to talk about what would happen to the rice.
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Article content “There are a lot of moving parts to this,” Hetherington said.
“Will the U.S. Army look into this? Will they say, “No, we’re going to take this boat and look into it fully”? You can’t move cargo off. I can see things like that happening. Trump must make sure that safe passage is safe if we want to be safe in the marketplace.
The Daily Bread Food Bank feeds 1 in 10 Torontonians and 13,000 people every day, according to Hetherington.
“I think this is a one-of-a-kind situation for us, and I’m glad we have backups in place.” “We promise that we will keep feeding the city no matter what, and we will keep that promise,” he said.
The food bank fed 36% more people two years ago, but only 18% more last year.
Hetherington said, “Still awful, but we had 4.1 million client visits last year. Before the pandemic, we had never had a million in our whole history.”
He also said that clients who used to come once a month now come 3.2 times a month instead of once a week.
