McCain Foods has turned over a full 24-hour production run at its Ballarat plant to Foodbank Australia, producing 120,000 meals valued at more than $790,000.
The run, held on Tuesday 10 November under Foodbank’s Collaborative Supply Program, produced 90,000 Healthy Choice Chicken Carbonara meals and 30,000 Pub Size Curried Sausages. They will be distributed in Ballarat and through Foodbank’s national charity network.
It is the fourth year of the initiative, which has now delivered more than 400,000 meals. Last year’s run produced about 81,600 Pub Size BBQ Meatlovers Loaded Parmas, valued at more than $775,000.
Suppliers Inghams, Maxum Foods, GrainCorp and Vacupack contributed ingredients and packaging for the run.
“Ballarat has been part of the McCain story for more than 50 years, and many of our employees and their families call this community home. That’s why initiatives like this are so important to us,” McCain Foods Managing Director ANZ, Mainak Dhar, said.
Regional hunger
Foodbank’s Hunger Map data shows 26.2 per cent of Ballarat households are food insecure, a figure Foodbank says has stayed high over the past year. The Foodbank Hunger Report 2026, released last month, found 3.6 million households nationally experienced food insecurity in the past year, about 100,000 more than in 2025. The rate is 36 per cent in regional areas, where 23 per cent of households are severely food insecure, and 34 per cent in regional Victoria.
“We cannot ignore the growing hunger divide between metropolitan and regional communities. It’s hard to accept that so many regional households are struggling to access adequate, nutritious food, even though they live closer to where it’s grown and produced,” Foodbank Australia CEO, Kylea Tink, said.
She encouraged more businesses to follow McCain’s lead.
Foodbank Victoria’s Ballarat Community Food Centre supplies 42 local charities. In the past 12 months, 7,236 people used its supermarket, including 1,144 families through the School Referral Program, and 387,000 kilograms of food and groceries were distributed locally.
McCain operates two production sites in Ballarat and one at Smithton in Tasmania. Its Canadian parent, McCain Foods Limited, employs about 22,000 people across 49 production facilities. The company invested $57 million in its Ballarat potato plant in 2017.
