Partnership will provide around 200,000 meals and save 330 tonnes of carbon annually.
Sysco companies Fresh Direct and Wild Harvest have joined Brakes’ London depot in forming a new, strategic partnership with leading emergency food charity, City Harvest to provide surplus food to vulnerable groups in the nation’s capital and beyond.
City Harvest has seen a dramatic increase in demand as families struggle with the cost of living crisis, with one in four Londoners facing food insecurity and, with rapidly escalating costs, City Harvest is seeing demand from people who have never before needed food banks.
One beneficiary of the new partnership, Hodo Dirir, Headteacher at Cyril Jackson Primary School, Tower Hamlets, explained the importance of food donations: “You’ve got kids coming in, they’ve not had breakfast. They are starving. How do we expect them to learn? We have to feed them.”
The new partnership will see City Harvest collect from Fresh Direct and Wild Harvest’s Dagenham depot twice a week, in addition to weekly collections from Brakes’ site in Park Royal, helping charities including Shepherd’s Bush Families Project and The Soup Kitchen London. It is anticipated that food donated by Sysco GB will provide around 200,000 meals every year and save approximately 330 tonnes of carbon.
Sysco GB Sustainability Manager, Emily Pinkney, said: “It’s fantastic to work with an organisation like City Harvest to ensure surplus food goes to support people who really need it. Our goal is to minimise food waste through every stage of our operations, but sometimes it’s unavoidable, and this partnership will help ensure that it’s not wasted. Working with City Harvest is so easy, we recommend them to other companies as a sustainable solution to surplus food.”
Sarah Calcutt, CEO at City Harvest added: “City Harvest loves working with sustainable companies like Sysco to co-create maximum positive social impact. Our partnership with Sysco ensures no good food is wasted and people facing extreme hardship will be able to feed their families. Across Wild Harvest, Brakes and Fresh Direct, we source an extensive range of fresh quality food and ingredients that our charities will use to promote health and wellbeing to vulnerable people in this tough economic climate.”
The partnership with City Harvest supports Sysco’s Purpose which is ‘Connecting the world to share food and care for one another’, which will see Sysco generate $500m worth of good by 2025, including £10m in the UK. The Fresh Direct team will also spend time volunteering at the City Harvest depot to ensure that they understand the demands on the charity and the value it is adding to local communities, fostering even closer links between the two organisations.
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