Our local community in and around Northamptonshire is very important to us. We have a number of longstanding partnerships which enable us to find ways to support our community and give back. We donate surplus stock to more than 11,000 charities through industry schemes FareShare & GroceryAid. We’re also very excited to have partnered with Magic Breakfast to support school breakfast clubs and hope to provide over 2 million breakfasts a year to hungry children.
GroceryAid has been looking after those in the grocery industry for 160 years.
First founded in 1857 as the National Grocers’ Benevolent Fund (NGBF), today thousands of grocery people turn to GroceryAid for financial support and practical assistance. Whether a small independent retailer or supermarket employee, a production line worker, wholesaler or a delivery driver, GroceryAid offers wide-ranging support. Each year more than £4.5million is spent on welfare support for those in the industry that need it most. Weetabix has been a supporter of GroceryAid for over 15 years and we were recently awarded the GroceryAid Gold Achievement Award for the seventh consecutive year. Whether it’s debt, loneliness, stress or serious illness, GroceryAid’s #notbuyingit – and neither are we.
Magic breakfast’s mission to ensure that no child is too hungry to learn is a cause that aligns perfectly with our purpose, and we’re aiming to provide two million breakfasts a year to children who would otherwise start their school day hungry.
Research compiled by Magic Breakfast highlights the consequences of malnutrition and hunger on children’s academic development. It finds that persistently disadvantaged children, those eligible for free school meals for 80 per cent or more of their school life, leave primary school more than a year behind their peers.
FareShare is the UK’s largest food redistribution charity, fighting hunger and food waste by redistributing good food that would otherwise go to waste to frontline charities and community groups that support vulnerable people – including homeless hostels, children’s breakfast clubs and lunch clubs for older people.
The charity has been working with the food industry, including retailers, food service providers and manufacturers for more than 20 years to identify ways to reduce waste before it occurs and then to redistribute any quality, in date surplus food to local charities. Without their current supply of FareShare food one in five partner charities would close down. Together with FareShare, we want to make sure that doesn’t happen. We will continue to support FareShare to redistribute food to charities and community groups across the East Midlands and beyond.
Marcus has developed an inclusive Task Force that has successfully campaigned on a number of key policy points, encouraging the Government to implement recommendations from the National Food Strategy report, commissioned by the Government and written by Henry Dimbleby.
1) The Taskforce has already secured Government backing for a number of its key asks, namely:
Expansion of holiday provision (food and activities) to support all children on free school meals, reaching an additional 1.1million children
2) Increasing the value of the Healthy Start vouchers to £4.25 per week (from £3.10) and expanding into all those on Universal Credit or equivalent, reaching an additional 290,000 pregnant women and children under the age of 4.
We continue to support Marcus in his campaign, which is currently focused on ensuring that everyone who is eligible for Healthy Start Vouchers is making use of them, and will continue to support his aim that no child in the UK goes hungry.
