Australia’s homeless to get pineapple windfall

MELBOURNE - Call it pineapple windfall but the homeless Down Under will soon be feasting on the fruit.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is getting over 800,000 cans of pineapple - weighing 1.1 million kilos, filling 50 semitrailers and costing 3 million dollars - for the nation’s homeless community.

The commission has asked American company Heinz, which took over Aussie firm Golden Circle in 2008, to stop marketing products with the label “proudly Australian owned”.

Accordingly thousands of tonnes of wrongly labelled pineapple cans will have to be disposed of, reports The Sunday Telegraph.

But now the poor and destitute will get to enjoy the fruit, thanks to charity Foodbank Australia.

“They said, ‘Have we got something for you!”" News.com.au quoted Foodbank chief executive John Webster, as saying.

He went on: “There’s literally 1000 pallet loads of sliced pineapple, diced pineapple, crushed pineapple, pineapple in sweetened juices, unsweetened juices and also juice by itself.

“This is just magic product … if you think of any number of meals where you can use pineapple - it can be used in any of the three meals of the day and of course it’s shelf-stable. It’s easy to use in the welfare agencies and get out to the people in need.”

“This will certainly be our single largest donation, unless we get another wonderful surprise,” Webster added. (ANI)