Introducing Tasmania’s Social Wholesaler

Loaves & Fishes Tasmania is embarking on an exciting new project — a Social Wholesaler: to support affordable, reliable, and community-led food access across the state.

Every week, community organisations and emergency food relief agencies across Tasmania step up to meet urgent food needs. But behind the scenes, many of these same groups are also spending scarce resources to top up their supply with purchased food — filling the gap between what’s on hand and what’s needed to ensure people are fed.

We’re looking into better ways to help stretch budgets.

What Is a Social Wholesaler?

Our Social Wholesaler is not an emergency food relief service. It’s a supply-side solution — designed to offer reliable access to quality fresh, low-cost and where possible Tasmanian food at below supermarket rates to agencies and community organisations that are already doing the work of feeding Tasmanians.

It’s not a silver bullet — but it could be another powerful piece of the puzzle.

We Need Both Supply & Local Delivery

There is a lot of important talk about moving towards resilience and food security, and the Social Wholesaler is being designed to support both of these concepts. So, it feels right to explore what the terms mean in a real world context.

Food security doesn’t just mean having enough food in the world. It means people in your neighbourhood — and your own household — can get the right food, when they need it, in a way that supports health, dignity, and stability.

To make that happen, we need two things working together:

1. A reliable, affordable supply of food — that’s what the Social Wholesaler is all about.
2. Local places where people can actually access that food in ways that make sense for them — created for and by the folks in the community

These two pieces create a full system that supports long-term food security for Tasmanians doing it tough.

Project timeline

With support from the Tasmanian Government, Loaves & Fishes is now in the Discovery Phase of developing a Social Wholesaler that meets the needs of Tasmanian agencies. During Phase 1, we will work with a small number of Southern agencies and community organisations to test the Social Wholesaler model with real world scenarios.

How to get involved in Phase 1 – Southern Agencies & Organisations Only

Right now, we’re asking agencies in Southern Tasmanian to complete a short survey on how and where they’re purchasing top up food. This will help us see the true cost to the sector and better understand what items agencies need access to.

📄 Download our one-pager here: https://loavesandfishestasmania.org.au/Tasmanias-Social-Wholesaler.pdf

✅ Complete the survey here: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/TasSocialWholesaler

Whether your organisation spends under $100 a week or $1,000 a month, your insights matter.

Get in touch with Chez if you’re interested in chatting about this project – we’re excited to be building it together.

Have questions?
Contact: Chez Orchard – Project Manager – Social Wholesaler
Email: chez.orchard@lft.org.au
Phone: 0429 032 923