FareShare is celebrating being one of eight charities to be awarded grants from the Government’s £500,000 Food Waste Reduction Fund.
The new grant funding will allow two of our centres in the south of England to store and redistribute even more food with the purchase of both a walk in freezer and chest freezers. And the second grant will be used by FareShare Yorkshire to fund the costs of buying and running a 7.5 ton lorry. This lorry will enable the team to access much needed quality food that suppliers are unable to have delivered to our site in Barnsley.
FareShare Chief Executive Lindsay Boswell said: “We’re always grateful to receive support to help us feed people in need. These two grants will enable us to start accessing new types of food to ensure that even more surplus is saved from waste.”
“The Food Waste Reduction Fund will certainly help redistribution charities deliver more food in the short term. There are many economic, environment and social benefits to redistributing surplus food, and I would like to see the Government being braver and working with charities like FareShare to make innovative differences to the benefit of us all.”
“While this fund is welcomed, FareShare believes the only way to reduce food waste in the supply chain is for the Government to give food companies the same financial incentive to deliver good surplus food to food charities, as they do to take it to anaerobic digestion plants. Good edible food should not be turned into energy – it should be going to feed vulnerable people.”
FareShare launched a campaign called Feed People First in February 2018 to encourage the Government to offset the costs of charitable food redistribution for food manufacturers, processors and packers (which could include re-packing, harvesting, transporting, storage and handling) so that 100,000 tonnes of food could be used for people in need. By doing this, UK charities could be saved £150m, savings which they could reinvest into their services and feed even more people in need.
Links
http://www.wrap.org.uk/content/uk-food-redistribution-increase
