29 April 2025
“We are a food bank. We’ve got a lot of other services, but our core function is to provide food bank support,” says Moray Food Plus Manager, Mairi McCallum.
Moray Food Plus was set up in 2012 to support the community with access to food by providing a host of services, including a food bank, Big Blue, a mobile pantry which visits surrounding villages, The Bosie family centre, and a money advice service which helps people to ensure they are receiving the right benefits.
“We cover the whole county of Moray, and the last couple of years we’ve supported around 10,000 people during that time,” Mairi explains. “We have a whole range of projects, and we’ve started developing more early intervention projects to offer support.
“We have Big Blue, which is our mobile pantry. We promote that as a zero-waste project and that goes to about 30 villages around Moray that are very rural, and they don’t have immediate access to shops. People spend £2.50 per shop, and they get a choice of things. It’s a mixture of core products that we buy with the money that we generate and the surplus food that we get through FareShare.
“We’ve got The Bosie which is a family centre where we work with all ages and all sectors of the community. We do a lot of cooking work, we do parenting groups, supper clubs. And we work with children.
“We also have our Money Advice Service, and we felt that was really important. The food bank is like a sticky plaster, it fixes one issue, but actually most people need a food bank because of low income. So, we’re able to offer money advice trying to do a bit of income maximisation and benefit checks.
“We also do family resilience work in partnership with schools, which includes one to one work with families.”
The group receives food from Tesco every week, both via the FareShare Go programme where they collect surplus food, and via the in-store donation point where customers can donate long-life food items year-round.
“The food we get from the donation points goes to the food bank and the surplus food goes to Big Blue so people have the choice whether to take it or not,” Mairi tells us.
“We also redistribute food to partner organisations, so it either supports the work that they do, sometimes they might use it to have a soup at lunch time, or it directly supports their clients.
“And then we also work in partnership with the local community justice to work a gardening project with them. What’s grown gets distributed either to partner organisations or other pantries. So, a lot of the surplus food that we get from FareShare or from the garden goes to them, and we do community meals in partnership with different organisations too.”
While Moray Food Plus get a lot of food via FareShare, the need is so great that they still need to purchase additional items in order to meet demand.
“Food is really important,” Mairi continues. “We spend up to £3,000 a month buying stock, so the amount of donations that we got leading up to Christmas was just invaluable. It’s meant that we’ve not had to spend quite so much money in January, February and hopefully into March because we’ve got that bank. There are always things you’re going to be short of, but we’re not having to spend quite as much. We’ve kind of set ourselves the limit of about £3,000 a month because really it would be endless otherwise.
“The donations that we get through are really, really important. With the surplus foods, we’ve developed a few services around that, we have our food hub which relies on the surplus food, it gets sorted and redistributed through Big Blue and is a mixture of bought food and the surplus.”
Moray Food Plus has a massive reach, serving thousands of people across the county in many hard to reach areas. Without the support of Mairi and the team, many people simply would not be able to access the food bank or pantry services due to being situated in remote villages.
Mairi explains: “We cover the whole county, and geographically it’s really large. A lot of the food banks, it’s a very social thing: people come in, they can access support, they can have a chat and a cup of tea and then they can sort of select their foods. Unfortunately, we can’t operate in that way because some people live over an hour’s drive away. And if they don’t have money for food, they don’t have money for petrol, they don’t have money for buses. So, all of our parcels are either delivered direct to the people’s houses or a drop off point or to an agency or a federal agency.
“There’s no stigma around the service, so it’s good having that surplus food there and people kind of buy into that the idea that it’s still good quality. A lot of it is bread, cakes or baked goods, but there are times we get the glut of the carrots and the tatties and things like that.”
While getting food to people remains the core aim of Moray Food plus, the team also offers wraparound services to help people improve their situations and get back on their feet.
“The people that access the Money Advice Service, more often than not, once they’ve had that intervention, we’ve been able to improve their financial circumstances, and they’ve not needed that support as much,” says Mairi.
“It can sometimes take six to nine months for a change in benefits, so we’re offering that support, but longer term, once they get that financial gain, they’re not needing to use it. An awful lot of the people using the Money Advice Service have access to food bank service and haven’t had to come back once their finances have been sorted. So that’s the service that’s had the most impact.
“A lot of the other services we offer, it’s about food, knowledge, confidence, friendship, family relationships, and food is that vehicle.”
As well as supporting individuals, Moray Food Plus also support other local organisations and agencies with food.
“A lot of our services kind of knit together,” says Mairi. “Guildry House, homeless accommodation in Elgin, we offer them larger support. Our food bank closes at lunchtime, so if somebody’s accommodated in the afternoon, they’ve got a store of food that they can access, and we supply that to them. We also give them the surplus foods because it’s like an extra for their residents.
“We do a wee bit of money advice work with some of the residents if they need it. We’ve done cooking support so we’re able to link all our services together that way. People are learning the skills and getting the money advice, so their income improves and they’re not having to access the food bank.”
Food is the element that keeps people coming back to Moray Food Plus, with people understanding that, whatever their circumstances, the team is there to support them.
Mairi continues: “Even if we have a volunteer meeting, we make sure there’s food there because we just find it’s a nice way for people to relax and chat, so we’ve built a lot of our services around that.”
In spite of the support services offered by Moray Food Plus, the need for help continues to grow across Moray due to factors such as continual increases in utility bills.
“Income benefits just really aren’t high enough,” Mairi laments. “During Covid, when we had that benefit uplift, that really made a difference to people. They do need to be increased. There has to be that kind of minimum level of support provided to people.
“I think for some people that we have worked with, you can do income maximisation, you can do benefit checks, but if everybody’s getting everything they’re entitled to and it’s still not enough, then there’s not really much more we can do.
“Because we’re in the north of Scotland, a lot of people are living in older houses and we have longer winters, so you know, energy prices are going up and up. So that’s having quite an impact. We do provide cold parcels, food for people that don’t have any electricity. We provide kettle parcels for people that don’t want to use a lot of electricity. So, we’ve had to adapt our services really around the impact of the cost of living.
“Families need more support when the kids are off school and, although they do get the kind of equivalent money as a school meal, it’s not really enough when you compare it when you’re going shopping and you’re having to cook, and you’ve got the kids at home.
“Winter always leading up to Christmas and just kind of after Christmas tends to be busier. And definitely over the winter, people do have that quandary of heating or eating. Living in this area it does get really cold and winter lasts a long time.”
Three local Tesco stores have donation points in store so that customers can donate to Moray Food Plus, and during the Tesco Winter Food Collection there was a big uptick in people showing their support for the organisation.
“One store in particular was way above what we expected. And actually, that support has continued as well. It’s not the biggest out of the three stores either but the response has been really good. We were surprised at how much came through because we have kind of seen the donations going down because the cost of living has affected people in all sorts of ways and folk have been really, really generous this time round.
“The permanent collection is important in two ways. One, obviously, we really do rely on donations. The other side of it is our offices only open in the mornings, so it’s useful for us to be able to say to people if they’ve got donations, actually we’ve got these permanent collection points that you can drop them in. It’s good for people when they’re going shopping because we know that they’re buying extra. So having that permanent collection is really important just to get that all year-round support.
“I think our profile is pretty high locally. We’re the only food bank that covers the whole region. There are a few smaller, local ones. I think most people are aware of us, but it’s always good to have that presence and it’s also an opportunity just to thank people for donating to us as well.”
