This year was our 6th national ‘Christmas Gift’ donation campaign and at the end of a long year we’re heart-warmed that it was the biggest one yet!
Christmas at My Food Bag
Christmas is always such an exciting time for us at My Food Bag. It is when the amazing chefs in our Development Kitchen get to show what food magic they whipped up this year. It’s also when our foodies get to dig into holiday delights from goodies in their orders, through to our Baking or Christmas Boxes. While all this is fun, the biggest reason we get excited is because we get to run our national Christmas Gift donation campaign.
Annual Christmas Gift Campaign
Christmas is a time of excitement, anticipation and celebration for many but, unfortunately, for a large number of Kiwis it is also a time of increased hardship. In the wake of the Covid-19 and what has been, for many, a rough year this is especially true this Christmas.
We’re proud to say this marks the sixth year where we have run our annual ‘Christmas Gift’ campaign. During November we worked with our amazing courier and charity partners to offer our foodies an easy way to make a donation this Christmas. This year, as with all years before, our foodies across Aotearoa pitched in hugely to help make the biggest difference we can.
Boxes were filled up with food, toiletries and new toys to gift to those who need a hand this Christmas. Once full, the box would be picked up by NZ Post and taken to a charity to be sorted. This year we were unbeliebably touched by how generous our foodies were!
How did it go?
We’re always touched by how much is donated by our wonderful foodies. Over the years since the gift campaigns began close to 100,000 items have been donated. This year, in a massive showing of community support and aroha from our foodies, we saw another huge response. With the final numbers in, we were touched to find out that over 25,000 items were donated.
The donations provided by the My Food Bag customers are incredibly generous and our team are so stoked with the quality of the parcels we were able to pack for the vulnerable households we support! You are all amazing! You’ve made a big difference in the lives of the people reached by these gifts.
Jake McPhee – Red Cross Auckland
Volunteer Box Packing
Volunteer team at Auckland City Mission 
Volunteers packing boxes at Auckland City Mission 
Volunteers sorting food at Auckland City Mission 
Volunteer team at Red Cross Auckland
This year we had the wonderful opportunity to do more than help get the boxes to our charity partners. Thanks to the enthusiastic people at Redcross Auckland and Auckland City Mission a bunch of our own office-based foodies were able to help pack donations. We had teams head out from our Auckland office to help unpack the donations from our generous foodies and sort the gifts. See what our team felt about the experience:
It was a genuinely touching experience to help out at Red Cross. To see how much had been donated and all the amazing support from people across the country was incredibly moving.
Tom ‘Tiramisu’ – Innovation
It was so cool to see the amazing work and meet the people behind the City Mission. Being able to be apart of the huge effort to help those in need around Christmas time was really special!
georgia ‘salsa’ – Development kitchen
It was amazing to see how generous people were with their donations and it’s very heart-warming to know such incredible gifts will be going to Kiwis in need this Christmas.
IMOGEn ‘taco’ – marketing
A HUGE Thank You to our Donation Partners 💚
We want to finish with a huge thank you to all of our foodies who donated but also to our amazing partners who were able to make this possible.
Auckland City Mission 
Christchurch City Mission 
Wellington City Mission 
Red Cross New Zealand 
New Zealand Post
While this donation drive is over for the year there is still so much you can do to help if you want to get involved this Christmas. Check out the donation links below for our charities!
