Marks & Spencer teams up with charity to make meals for homeless people – instead of just donating the ingredients
- Company will donate one million meals to those in need ahead of Christmas
Marks & Spencer have teamed up with a charity to make and deliver meals for homeless people – instead of just donating the ingredients.
The meals donated to charity FareShare will be of the same quality as store-bought food and M&S, alongside its partner and manufacturer 2 Sisters Food Group, uses capacity in its supply chain for the scheme rather than leftovers from stores.
Alex Freudmann, M&S’ managing director of food, told the Telegraph the company has re-distributed extra products for more than seven years, but this wasn’t enough.
He said M&S wanted to get the fresh food ‘directly to those who need it’.
‘In an industry first, we’re donating over one million meals – all with our Eat Well seal of health approval – and exactly the same quality and freshness as you would find in our stores,’ Mr Freudmann said.
Marks & Spencer have teamed up with a charity to make and deliver meals for homeless people – instead of just donating the ingredients
Alex Freudmann (pictured), M&S’ managing director of food, said the company has re-distributed extra products for more than seven years, but this wasn’t enough. He said M&S wanted to get the fresh food ‘directly to those who need it’
‘Flipping our mindset from using food that is too good to waste – laudable as that is – to innovating to use capacity that is too good to waste.
‘So everyone can have access to a fresh, hot and healthy meal.’
While it is not unusual for supermarkets to donate their unsold, end-of-life food to charities, those products have usually been refrigerated for weeks and been transported several times.
READ MORE: Revealed: A FIFTH of children are worried about not getting enough food at home amid cost of living crisis
In the M&S scheme, spare capacity, raw ingredients, packaging labour as well as fuel and lorries are used to make the extra meals at the top of the chain.
Mr Freudmann said the million meals that will be distributed via community projects, for example to those looking to get back into work or at schools, ahead of Christmas are just a start for M&S.
He added that he hopes Michael Marks, who founded the company in 1884 at Kirkgate Market in Leeds, would approve of the direction M&S is going.
The M&S food donations come amid rising food poverty amid the cost of living crisis.
According to figures by the Department for Work and Pensions, three per cent of families in the UK, so around 2.1million Britons, used a food bank from March 2021 to March 2022.
The Trussell Trust charity network’s food banks distributed nearly three million emergency food parcels between April 2022 and March 2023.
They also found that during the same period, 760,000 people used food banks for the first time.
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