Tesco celebrates food donations

Colleagues showcased the Community Food Connection scheme, which is run in conjunction with leading food charity FareShare.

They spent time talking to customers about how the scheme works to provide free surplus food and invited local charities and community groups who already receive food from the scheme to encourage more to sign up.

The Community Food Connection scheme ensures that every Tesco store in the UK is able to donate surplus food at the end of the day to charities and community groups. It uses an innovative app developed by social enterprise FoodCloud, to notify groups each night about the food available for collection.

Today, more than 7,000 groups are able to pick up free food from their local Tesco store. Since the scheme began, Tesco has donated more than 36 million meals to those groups, with more than a million meals a month now being donated. The Cumbernauld Tryst Road Extra store has donated 26,234 meals to date.

Alec Brown, Head of Community at Tesco, said: “At Tesco we firmly believe that no good food should go to waste that is why we set up our Community Food Connection scheme, which ensures that our surplus food is put to good use in the local community.

“Last weekend we celebrated four years of the scheme with our colleagues and customers.”