Bearing fruit: Adelaide’s grassroots answer to food waste

“Wherever there’s fruit, we’ll pick it,” says Fruit Share Adelaide’s Founder, Brett Dunstone.

With increasing food insecurity in Australia and food wastage sitting at 7.6 million tonnes per year, Fruit Share Adelaide is working to bridge the gap by harvesting excess fruit from backyard trees, old orchards and commercial farms across Adelaide and the Hills and redistributing it to food banks, community centres and schools.

“I’ve always had a bit of a backyard garden and hated seeing produce going to waste,” Brett explains.

Inspired by Hidden Orchard, a group in Ballarat that was redistributing produce, Brett published a Facebook post to gauge local interest in 2023. The strong response confirmed there was both a need for the service and willing volunteers. An early partnership with Onkaparinga Food Security Collaborative helped secure a grant from the local council and Fruit Share was officially underway with its first harvest taking place in January 2024. Since then, the organisation has grown both in size and structure.

“Things have moved quickly,” Brett explains. “We’ve gone from being a small group to one with a committee, then becoming a not-for-profit, and now a registered charity with DGR1 status thanks to some pro bono legal help.”

Fruit Share’s impact has grown too with the size of its harvest increasing from 11.5 tonnes in 2024 to more than 20 tonnes in 2025 and around 90 organisations taking delivery of the produce. The charity even caught the attention of ABC TV’s Gardening Australia, which featured Fruit Share in a recent episode.

Apples, pears, citrus and stone fruit are some of Fruit Share’s more common harvests, but volunteers have also picked cherries, tomatoes, avocados and exotic fruit like white sapote – a prized tropical fruit from Central America.

“We recently even picked olives which we were able to have pressed at no cost, so we now have a couple of drums of olive oil that are about to be bottled and distributed,” Brett (pictured centre below) says.

Growing community with every harvest

Fruit Share’s operations rely entirely on volunteers. Even Brett, who is an engineer by profession, is a volunteer, doing this work full-time without a salary. Almost 450 volunteers have registered with Fruit Share and more than 100 volunteers have taken part in the harvesting to date.

“It’s still a pretty lean operation,” Brett says. “I have a trailer and we pretty much use our own vehicles.

“If we’re picking a bigger harvest, for instance at some of the commercial farms, we’ll arrange for the owner to have it delivered it to Food Bank or Oz Harvest once we’ve picked it, or the food banks might be able to bring their trucks to collect it.”

Foundation SA Sub-fund holders, Shylie and Mark Mackintosh from the Mackintosh Family Fund, recently supported Fruit Share Adelaide with a grant that has helped purchase a new software system to improve volunteer management and logistics.

“We learnt about the opportunity to support Fruit Share through the team at Foundation SA,” Shylie explains.

“We were happy to support something that makes such good use of people’s excess fruit (including ours). Anything that made the volunteer organising more streamlined seemed a very good use of a relatively modest donation.”

After getting by with spreadsheets and Google forms, the software has been a game changer for managing Fruit Share’s volunteers including sign-ups and coordinating teams for different harvest locations.

“The software makes the process easier and more accessible which is important because a lot of our volunteers are older or retired or not as comfortable using technology,” Brett explains. “It’s also less of a manual process and less reliant upon me being the single point of coordination.”

Fruit Share’s volunteers span all ages and backgrounds, and new connections and friendships have sprung from the organisation’s growing community.

“That’s the thing,” Brett says, “our work helps with food waste and food insecurity, but there’s also this strong sense of community.

“We often have elderly people who have a fruit tree in their backyard and when we come and pick it, they really enjoy the social connection but also feeling that they’re contributing and helping in their small way. Our volunteers will often sit and have a cup of tea and a chat with them.

“We also have some volunteers who have recently arrived in Australia and it’s great to be part of building those connections. During a couple of recent harvests, when you need a couple of people working together, we often bring together people who don’t necessarily know each other, but then you see them, spending a couple of hours working together and building those sorts of relationships.”

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