No good food should go to waste

Inside the warehouse in St Jude’s that is home to FareShare South West, volunteers chat, listen to music and laugh as they work to sort through stacks of surplus food. There are packs of Lurpak butter, Genius gluten-free bread and endless tins of Heinz beans this morning.

FareShare is a national charity, with 21 different centres all over the nation. For 20 years they have been working hard to help tackle the problem of food waste, by redistributing surplus food given to them by various different sources. The food in the Bristol branch comes from supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose, Aldi, as well as online food delivery companies such as Ocado and Amazon.

The FareShare warehouse in St Jude’s is the largest surplus food supplier in the South West

“We’re the largest distribution charity in the region,” explains Phoebe Ruxton, community fundraising and communications manager for FareShare. “In Bristol we receive around 350 tonnes of surplus food a year. The 17,000 tonnes FareShare as a whole shifts may sound like quite a lot, but it is in fact only 5 per cent of the available surplus out there. We distribute food before it gets to retail level, unlike some other redistribution companies.

“The bulk of our work is getting food from harvest level, such as the big regional depots for supermarkets. That means we have access to quite a lot more. We’re the only charity that has the infrastructure and things like the food safety standards, enabling us to have this relationship with the food industry. The aim in the next three years is to get up to 20 per cent of the food surplus through our doors.”

Just a small amount of the food in the warehouse

There can be various reasons for food becoming surplus, and FareShare accepts lots of different types of this. For instance, products with packaging and forecasting errors, unfinished and discontinued items, damaged packaging, seasonal items and products with foreign packaging. It is certainly a myth that the food they redistribute is of low quality.

“The entire supply chain is under immense pressure to move food quickly in order to get the food to the intended customers, as well as to keep the supermarket shelves permanently full,” Phoebe continues. “Just one delay or mistake early on in the chain can mean massive inefficiencies later on. Forecasting, human and packaging errors can all mean that large food orders get rejected by the supermarket right at the beginning of the food chain. Unharvested vegetables or ‘wonky’ fruit comes straight to us from the farm.”

Fareshare always need more volunteers to help distribute their surplus food

In the past few years, supermarkets have been working on improving the amount of good food they throw out. Morrisons, which in 2016 was revealed to have donated zero per cent of their surplus food, have begun selling imperfect fruit and vegetables rather than rejecting it at the farm, yet 1.4 million tonnes of food are still wasted by the food industry every year, 270,000 tonnes of which is still edible. UK households too have been reducing the amount of food that they waste: from 2007 the figure has dropped by 17 per cent, but still stands at around one fifth of all food bought ending up in the bin.

However, according to research by FareShare, 8.4 million people in the UK are struggling to afford to eat – a number equivalent to the entire population of London. The work being done in this unassuming warehouse is helping to distribute food to charities, hostels, school breakfast clubs, refuges and community cafes across the city, feeding those who need help the most.

FareShare are currently seeking more volunteers and offer flexible hours and free food in return for your time. To find out more, visit www.fareshare.org.uk/get-involved/volunteering