The foodbank shelves would normally be fully stocked with a variety of food items, ready to be packed and handed over to hungry families as emergency food parcels.
A lack of food donations to the Invercargill foodbank has forced it to reduce the opening days of their pātaka.
"If you came down and saw how empty our shelves are, it would scare you," he said.
"We've got less resources, less donations, but more people coming in wanting food.
"We actually have had to cut back on the numbers that we can actually sustainably feed people with; cutting down from 60 a week to 30 a week, because we're just running out of food," he said.
"We have to cut down on days that we're open as well.
"If we don't have it in the budget, we can't buy any new food and that just means we can't help people, which is a sad place to be in."
The Southland foodbank had "been in the red" all this year and last.
Mr Sanson’s team had been regularly distributing about 20 emergency food parcels every Friday for the last 21 months, but feared tomorrow would see them having to "turn people away".
"It's a really hard call to make, but when your bowl is empty, it's very hard to share with somebody else."
The number of food parcels sent out between January and September last year was 662.
During the same period this year that number had increased to 735.
Last September, 266 food parcels left the foodbank shelves and last month that figure rose to 383.
The charity had been educating people that food parcels were for those who required them in an emergency.
But the message had not reduced the numbers of people lining up, he said.
"In the Bible, it had Jesus saying, ‘the poor you shall always have with you’, and that's the people who we want to support on a regular basis.
"But that does make it quite tough when even our cupboard is getting very bare.
"If anybody's got any surplus, we would certainly want to utilise that to pass on to those in desperate need."
