Tesco customers donate two million meals to food charities

Two million meals worth of food donations have been made by Tesco customers to the retailer’s Winter Food Collection for FareShare and the Trussell Trust, the retailer has revealed.

The donations were made at collection points between 27 November and 2 December in all of the supermarket’s large and convenience stores.

Donations to the Trussell Trust help food banks to provide emergency food parcels to people who cannot afford the essentials, while donations to FareShare support thousands of frontline local charities in communities across the country.

This year will see both charities face their busiest winter yet as more people turn to them for support, Tesco explained. The Trussell Trust is expecting to distribute one food parcel every eight seconds over the next three months and the charity has reported that as many as 320,000 people needed to access a food bank for the first time between April and September. That is the most ever for this period.

Meanwhile FareShare has over 1,500 frontline charities on its waiting list seeking food to help them provide meals for people facing hunger this winter.

Tesco chief executive Ken Murphy said: “The generosity of our customers is truly amazing. At a time when people are facing financial strain, they still went out of their way to support our charity partners in stores across the UK.

“From a single carton of long-life milk to a whole trolley of items, every customer who donated helped us to make this one of the most successful Winter Food Collections ever.”

In addition to the donations of food, the pre-Christmas Winter Food Collection saw customers donate more than £300,000 to the charities by rounding up their bills at the till and donating through a link from Tesco’s online groceries website.

Tesco also provides its unsold food to FareShare and altogether Tesco and its customers have given the equivalent of more than 39 million meals to both charities in the past year.