Foodstuffs North Island Cyclone Gabrielle Update

The following statement can be attributed to Chris Quin, CEO Foodstuffs North Island:

What a tragic 72 hours, so many New Zealanders lives have been impacted. Our deepest condolences go to those who have lost loved ones and who are facing the challenge of rebuilding. To everyone affected, please know our teams have been working around the clock. We’ve got the stock, we’ve got the plan and we’ve got the means to get essential items to you as we support your towns and communities to recover.

In the past 24 hours our team has made significant progress getting essentials to isolated communities and reopening and replenishing our stores where we can make deliveries.

All our PAK’nSAVE stores are open, and we have just one New World closed, New World Onekawa in Napier, and there are options available for shoppers. Today, we hope to gain road access to Onekawa in order to move a generator through to enable the store to reopen. We have seven Four Squares not yet able to open, all in the Hawke’s Bay.

Replenishing isolated communities is our absolute focus. While there’s lots of great work going on to clear slips and reopen roads, people need the essentials now. We have a plan to re-open each store and we have the required stock and resources to make it happen. The biggest hurdle for us remains the roads. To get stock through in the past 24 hours we’ve used back roads, Unimog's and we’ve contracted a helicopter that can lift 2-3 ton to get essentials like toilet paper and water into stores that cannot yet get a delivery by road.

We’re using our Hasting depot as a staging point with the helicopter helping shift up to 40 pallets of stock and technology, such as Starlink kits for connecting to the internet, into the communities of Wairoa, Tokomaru Bay, Tologa Bay and Ruatoria.

Where connectivity allows, for the latest information on local stores, customers should check the store’s Facebook page.

Our HereforNZ team is working with community partners like Civil Defense Centres, Foodbanks, Social Supermarkets, City Missions, Community Trusts and charities like Butter Bean Motivation to provide support. We’ve now given at least $260,000 worth of food and goods to our partners.

Yesterday we provided around $50,000 to Hawkes Bay community partners and we’re actively working with Gisborne partners as well.

A huge shout out to our incredible teams for their heroic work and for continuing to go the extra mile every hour, while we make sure we get essentials to New Zealanders to recover from the devastation caused by Cyclone Gabrielle.

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