Tesco launches seventh Neighbourhood Food Collection
Melanie May | 3 December 2015 | News
Tesco’s seventh Neighbourhood Food Collection kicks off today, taking place across all stores until Saturday 5th December.
The event is run by Tesco in partnership with The Trussell Trust and FareShare, and aims to provide at least five million meals to people in need this winter: making this its biggest Neighbourhood Food Collection to date. In addition to the meals, Tesco is adding an extra 30% to all customer donations in the form of financial support to the two charities.
In the past, FareShare and The Trussell Trust have used this money to provide additional services at foodbanks, such as in-house financial advice, holiday lunch clubs for children, and the funding of deliveries in rural areas. The top-up has also helped FareShare to expand its network and reach more people in need. The top-up has resulted in combined funding of over £3.6 million to FareShare and The Trussell Trust since 2012.
Since Tesco launched the Neighbourhood Food Collections in 2012, over 27.5 million meals, including the Tesco top-up, have been donated. Tesco hopes that this latest collection will take the total beyond 30 million. Tesco stores display shopping lists of the food required by both charities, and invite customers to buy any of these items and to leave them at the store’s collection point.
The event relies heavily on volunteers, with last winter’s November collection involving some 20,000 across the UK. Tesco’s last collection took place in July, and saw customers donate 3.6m meals.
Lindsay Boswell, CEO of FareShare, said:
“It doesn’t need to take much, sadly, for an individual or a family to start struggling and experience hard times. The Neighbourhood Food Collection really helps us in our work to provide good food to 2,135 amazing frontline organisations which support people who are struggling to feed themselves.”
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About Melanie May
Melanie May is a journalist and copywriter specialising in writing both for and about the charity and marketing services sectors since 2001. She can be reached via thepurplepim.com.