Fight Hunger, Create Change | Business in the Community NI

Fight Hunger, Create Change

1 in 10 people in the UK are missing meals to pay their bills, yet four million tonnes of perfectly decent food is wasted each year.

Asda’s Chief Customer Officer Andy Murray stated, “we simply cannot – and will not – accept food being wasted whilst people in our communities go hungry”.

That is why Asda has joined forces with FareShare and The Trussell Trust to develop a truly innovative new partnership that will revolutionise the support foodbanks are able to offer people in food poverty.

Over the next three years, Asda’s ‘Fight Hunger Create Change’ programme will invest over £20 million in ensuring foodbanks have the capacity and infrastructure to offer fresh food and much needed support and advice to people in need.

Investing in the infrastructure of The Trussell Trust and FareShare will enable them to transport and store fresh food. This will make a real difference, as currently, both charities struggle to transport and store fresh food, which needs to be chilled, and means those using food banks are reliant on mainly tinned and packet foods.

The programme will help embed services such as debt counselling and job advice as part of the foodbanks – allowing people to access information that will help them out of food poverty. Asda is also expanding its existing food donation services to ensure that by 2020, every Asda store is able to donate its surplus food to food banks and do even more to support the local community. The programme will result in an additional 24 million meals every year.

Lindsay Boswell, Chief Executive of FareShare UK, said: “I believe that Asda’s investment has the potential to create such a multiplier effect that it could well be the largest single act of support since the creation of the National Lottery or the introduction of Gift Aid.”

For more information, email joe.mcdonald@asda.co.uk