29 December 2022
This year, FareShare is celebrating ten years of partnership with Tesco, a year that has seen the retailer pull out all the stops to support us through the pandemic and the cost of living crisis.
From running the innovative Buy One to Help a Child campaign, to an exciting reverse supermarket in London, Tesco continues to find new ways to support FareShare with surplus food, customer donations and funding to help us get food to the people that need it most.
In March, Tesco ran the second Buy One to Help a Child campaign which helped to raise more than £2m for FareShare which was used to support our continued operations and helped us to unlock more surplus food from the industry.
In September, we won the Charity Times Corporate National Partnership of the Year with a Retailer award for our work with Tesco during 2021-22 serving as testament to the importance of the work we do together. The judges at the awards said that our partnership with Tesco is an ‘excellent example of just how powerful the collaboration between a corporate and a charity can be’.
To mark ten years of the Tesco Food Collection, we worked together with Tesco and the Trussell Trust to launch a ‘reverse supermarket’, The Give Back Express. Situated in SoHo, London, the donation only pop up store was designed to bring customers inside to learn more about the work Tesco, FareShare and the Trussell Trust do and encourage vital donations to both charities. The pop up shop resulted in a donation of £20,000.
Tesco ran two food collections with FareShare again this year, one in summer and one in winter, to help us support people facing hardship as a result of the cost of living crisis. In addition to the donations of food, the pre-Christmas Tesco Food Collection saw generous customers:
Between January and November 2022, Tesco customers donated an incredible 1,000 tonnes of long-life food via in store donation points.
We hosted a Local Supplier Forum at FareShare Yorkshire in their Barnsley depot back in November. The day was a chance for us to share our collective knowledge of the food industry and, ultimately, how we can work together to redistribute more food to those who need it the most.
In May 2022, FareShare and Tesco launched the Step up to the Plate programme, where teams of people could volunteer at a mini food collection in store. FareShare food partner Nestle was one of the organisations participating and it enabled our partners to see the direct positive effect these types of activities have on the charities and community groups in our network. Over 1,600 meals were donated via this initial volunteering initiative.
Through FareShare Go, stores across the UK have redistributed more than 9,400 tonnes of food, the equivalent of more than 22.3 million meals, to our network of local charities.
Tesco has also redistributed more than 9 million meals worth of food through their regional distribution centres.
Tesco Head of Community, Claire de Silva, said: “This year marks a decade of Tesco working with FareShare and, over the last two years, we have seen our partnership grow even stronger. By working more strategically together we have been able to provide support in more ways, continue to divert two million meals each month to frontline charities and community groups and develop new initiatives across the business. As we face the dual challenges of tackling climate change and supporting communities amid the cost of living crisis our partnership has never been more important.”
Helen Davies, Senior Commercial Manager at FareShare, said: “The support that Tesco has given to FareShare over the last ten years has been insurmountable. We simply could not do all that we do at FareShare without Tesco. In our tenth year of working together, our partnership with Tesco is absolutely vital to our operations.
“Through the innovative Buy One to Help a Child campaign, two food collections and in store donation points, Tesco and all of its colleagues have enabled us to get surplus food, and customer donated food, to people facing hardship across the UK. Thank you, Tesco!”
