Joe Saxton went to visit FareShare last week at their London warehouse and sets out their latest campaign to try and reduce the amount of food waste in the UK.

FareShare, the UK’s largest food charity, has launched a campaign calling for the public to sign a petition that could help deliver an extra 100,000 tonnes of good surplus food to charities across the country over the next few years. FareShare currently redistributes around 13,500 tonnes of good quality surplus food to nearly 7,000 charities such as hospices, homeless shelters, children’s breakfast clubs and women’s refuges.

Food becomes surplus because of over-production, packaging malfunctions, labeling errors, over-supply due to favorable growing conditions, unexpected changes in demand, or short shelf life. It could be from a grower, a manufacturer or a retailer – right along the food supply chain, or well before it gets to a supermarket shelf.

In total every year at least 270,000 tonnes of perfectly good food is wasted in UK food production*.

Sign the petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/204156/

Such wastage takes place because currently there is no financial incentive for business to redistribute good quality surplus food to the charities. It is easier and cheaper to send the surplus to other processes of disposal. Charities support the 8.4 million people in the UK who go hungry, and FareShare is seeking to increase this number.

As FareShare Chief Executive Lindsay Boswell said to me when I saw him last week:

“It’s completely wrong that we have a situation where it’s cheaper to send thousands of tonnes of good edible food to anaerobic digestion plants or to animal feed, when there are millions of people experiencing food insecurity and regularly skipping meals across the UK right now.”

FareShare redistributes just 5% of the available surplus food, but with that we help feed half a million people a week – so just imagine what could be done with 100,000 tonnes. This is what France already does, and it can be done here too.

FareShare is asking the Government for £15 million annually to offset the costs of charitable food redistribution which could include re-packing, harvesting, transporting, storage and handling, so that 100,000 tonnes of food could be used for people in need. This will create a level playing field with the subsidized anaerobic digester industry. By doing this, UK charities could be saved £150m, -money that they could reinvest into their services and feed even more people in need.

Sign the petition: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/204156/

* WRAP figures, 2016 – http://www.wrap.org.uk/content/quantification-food-surplus-waste-and-related-materials-supply-chain