Growing wild game meat donations through Hunt and Share
Across New Zealand, hunters are helping feed families by donating wild game meat to foodbanks and community organisations. To support these efforts, the New Zealand Game Animal Council has launched Hunt and Share, a free platform that provides tools for safe, traceable wild game donations. The initiative is designed to support existing donation programmes and make it easier for hunters, butchers and charities to work together to get quality wild game meat to those who need it most.
Across New Zealand hunters are generously donating wild game meat to foodbanks, charities and households for families in need.
Much of that work happens in the background, driven by hunters who want to help their communities. This reflects the generosity and community spirit of the hunting sector and makes a real difference to those in need, while growing awareness that hunting can provide individual and community self-sufficiency, resilience, and food security.
The Game Animal Council’s newly launched Hunt and Share platform has been developed to support and help grow this work.
Hunt and Share is a free, voluntary online platform that provides practical tools for safe and traceable wild game meat donation. It includes a guidebook for donation organisers, a short online knowledge check for hunters, a meat donation record database, labels and batch IDs for traceability, and QR codes linking recipients to safe handling, storage and cooking information.
In simple terms, it provides the behind-the-scenes system that helps trace donated meat from the hill to the table. That matters because while recreationally harvested wild game meat can legally be donated, it does not automatically come with the same checks and balances that apply in the commercial system. If wild game meat donation is going to grow and continue to operate within a non-regulatory system, it needs practical safeguards around it. That is exactly what Hunt and Share has been designed to provide.
The platform is already being used by Game Changer NZ, a nationwide meat donation initiative led by the Wild Game Recovery Trust. Game Changer NZ coordinates the donation process by linking hunters, butchers, and foodbanks, while separately raising funds to cover the processing. To sign up to Game Changer NZ, hunters, butchers and foodbanks can go to gamechanger.wgrt.org.nz.
If you are interested in using Hunt and Share for your donation initiative, head to nzgac.org.nz/hunt-and-share.
These initiatives are not about replacing other meat donation programmes. There are already excellent local efforts around the country, and many hunters have been donating for years. Hunt and Share is about supporting existing initiatives if they wish to use it and making it easy for new groups to get started by taking care of the boring stuff behind the scenes.
