Puffin Produce Donates to FareShare UK To Help Prevent Food Waste and Feed The Nation
Haverfordwest based Puffin Produce Ltd have donated over 14 Tonnes of its fresh produce to FareShare UK between July and September this year.
FareShare is the UK’s largest food redistribution charity, with more than 30 warehouses across the UK.
It takes food from the food industry that can’t be sold in shops and redistributes it through a network of 11,000 frontline organisations, across the UK such as homeless hostels, school breakfast clubs, domestic violence refuges, older people’s lunch clubs, food banks and hospices.
Puffin Produce has been supplying FareShare with surplus produce since 2017 via its customer depots and this summer also signed up to the FareShare ‘Surplus with Purpose Fund’ and started supplying oversized cauliflower.
Mererid James, Sustainability Executive at Puffin Produce explains the Surplus with Purpose scheme, “Vegetables naturally come in all different shapes and sizes and sometimes our cauliflowers would not meet our customer specification for a variety of reasons. Usually, the main reasons would be the circumference of the curd being too big, or blemishes which affect their appearance. So rather than leaving them in the field we decided that it would be a good idea to donate them to this fantastic initiative by FareShare.”
Mererid continues, “Not only do these donations help people in genuine need, they also help towards our company goal of reducing food waste in line with our commitment to the Courtauld Agreement 2025.”
Shula Granville, Commercial Manager at FareShare also commented, “FareShare has received 13.9 tonnes of cauliflower so far from Puffin Produce, which is the equivalent to 33,095 meals. The warehouses receiving the cauliflowers commented on the fantastic quality and freshness of the cauliflower, but also how important fresh vegetables are to their charities. So, from everyone at FareShare and the charities we support, Thank You!”
The produce that Puffin Produce has donated has so far supported 695 frontline services that includes schools, hostels, community centres, food banks and drop-in services for families.
FareShare’s work has more than doubled since the start of the Covid-19 crisis and now distributes enough food for over 2 million meals a week.
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For more information about FareShare, please go to: https://fareshare.org.uk/
About FareShare
FareShare is the UK’s largest food redistribution charity, with more than 30 warehouses across the UK. It takes food from the food industry that can’t be sold in shops, either because of packaging errors, a short shelf life or overproduction. That food, which is the same as the food you’d eat at home, is then redistributed through a network of 11,000 frontline organisations, across the UK such as homeless hostels, school breakfast clubs, domestic violence refuges, older people’s lunch clubs, food banks and hospices. FareShare provides enough food to create almost a million meals for vulnerable people every week. At the start of the pandemic, FareShare launched a major Covid-19 response and more than trebled the amount of food distributed – over 3 million meals a week – to people in need each week.
