More than 40,000 meals have been provided to charities and community groups in the Great Yarmouth area thanks to a Tesco surplus food redistribution scheme.
The Community Food Connection has seen 40,705 meals handed out by the town’s store to local good causes, including homeless shelters, community centres, breakfast clubs, and groups providing food to vulnerable older people.
The total has been released to mark the roll-out of the scheme across all of Tesco’s stores across the UK.
Stores are able to provide surplus food every night, and currently almost 600,000 meals a week are being provided to good causes across the UK.
Since the scheme began four years ago more than 19 million meals have been provided to charity and community groups across the UK, saving them money which can be used to provide other services.
The Community Food Connection programme is run in conjunction with FareShare and FoodCloud.
Good causes are able to link up with local Tesco stores, from small Express stores to big Tesco Extras, via an app that allows store teams to alert them to surplus unsold food items available at the end of each day.
Not only does the scheme benefit the community groups involved, but it also prevents unsold food going to waste.
Tesco’s head of communityn Alec Brown, said: “We know that Community Food Connection is making a real difference to communities in Great Yarmouth by providing people in need with meals from food that would otherwise go to waste.
“Now that all of our stores are taking part in Community Food Connection there are more opportunities than ever for groups to benefit from the free food provided under the scheme. I would invite any group that thinks they could benefit from the scheme to contact FareShare, as we have the capacity to help even more good causes.”
Tesco helped develop the nationwide scheme in partnership with food redistribution charity, FareShare using an app created by the small social enterprise FoodCloud.
If you are a Greeat Yarmouth charity or community group that could benefit from Community Food Connection, visit http://fareshare.org.uk/getting-food/fareshare-go-support/ to register.
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