MORE THAN 55,000 meals have been provided to charities and community groups across Worcester, thanks to a project being run by Tesco.
The surplus food redistribution scheme Community Food Connection has been rolled out across all of the supermarket giant’s UK stores, from small Express stores to big Tesco Extras.
Among those receiving food as part of the scheme have been homeless shelters, community centres, breakfast clubs, and groups providing food to vulnerable older people.
The programme is operated in conjunction with FareShare and FoodCloud and an innovative app is used which allows store teams to alert organisations to surplus unsold food items available at the end of each day.
Tesco’s head of community Alec Brown said food that would otherwise go to waste was now making a real difference to communities by providing people in need with meals.
“Now all of our stores are taking part in Community Food Connection there are more opportunities than ever for groups to benefit from the free food provided under the scheme.
“I would invite any group that thinks they could benefit from the scheme to contact FareShare, as we have the capacity to help even more good causes.”
Lindsay Boswell, is the chief executive of FareShare, which helped Tesco by developing the app.
She said: “This is an incredible milestone in store-level food redistribution to charities which Tesco has made possible since developing the programme with FareShare and FoodCloud.”
She added Tesco had led the way by introducing the ‘step-change’ to tackle store surplus food and it had a great impact on the lives of vulnerable people, proving it could benefit other retailers and other local communities.
Tesco and FareShare are now calling on charities and community groups across Worcester to register for the scheme, which sees food including fresh produce such as fruit, vegetables and bakery products, as well as chilled products like meat, cheese and ready meals, donated for free to groups that sign up.
Charities and community groups should visit http://fareshare.org.uk/getting-food/fareshare-go-support/ for more information and to register.
