Food In the spotlight….

In the last newsletter we shared how our team of volunteer drivers collect surplus food from local supermarkets.  This time we share how we receive our largest scale donations from food redistribution charities and our smallest scale donations by bike!

TRJFP are very grateful to receive donations of surplus food from food redistribution charities including City Harvest and Felix.  These large volume donations are either delivered or collected by van weekly, and we use a hired Enterprise van twice a week to distribute the food around our four main venues that have storage facilities (ETNA, Linden Hall, Cambrian Centre and Ham).  These donations are very varied and it’s always exciting to see what turns up each week!  We can receive large volumes of seasonal fruit and veg, tinned goods, drinks, snacks, and ready meals.  Importantly, the food redistribution charities are our main source of meat and kitchen staples like pasta, rice and cooking oil.

On the other end of the volume scale we have a team of keen cyclists who use their own bikes with panniers or a backpack to collect small scale donations.  Currently we only collect frozen  surplus cooked chicken from KFC in Richmond (our other important source of meat!) but we are on the lookout for other small scale donations that could be collected by bike.

We appreciate all of our surplus food donations, whether they arrive by car, van or bike!  Without this surplus food there would be no TRJFP.