1.2 million meals donated to FareShare

On Saturday we launched our first ever national food drive, the One Million Meal Appeal with our charity partner FareShare. The appeal involved asking customers to add one extra store cupboard item to their shop, which they then put in a trolley behind the checkouts. Following the event, the food was sent to FareShare’s 17 depots across the country before being redistributed to the 700 charities served by FareShare on a daily basis.

Response to the initiative was overwhelming and together with Sainsbury's pledge to match customers' donations, a total of 1.2 million meals were donated to FareShare in just one day. That's enough to feed a sold-out LondonOlympic stadium 15 times!

Our top collecting store was Bridgemead where our customers donated 5,000 meals, followed closely by Camden and Sidney Street, where our customers donated 4,000 meals each. With our matched donations, these three stores gave a total of 26,000 meals between them.

The project required a phenomenal effort from colleagues at over 600 of our stores and 12 depots, as well as the many volunteers recruited by FareShare who gave their own time to help customers understand what we were trying to do. Thanks should also go to Allied Bakeries who helped with logistics and volunteering. Chief executive, Mark Fairweather even turned up at our Bury St Edmunds store to help out. The pictures below show some of the other brilliant people who took part in the day. A great time was had by all and we were truly blown away by everyone's enthusiasm. 

As FareShare is primarily a B2B charity, many customers might not have been aware of the work we have been doing with them since 1994. Hopefully this weekend's food drive will have gone some way towards changing that. The project sparked the interest of national news and several MPs including Minister for Civil Society, Nick Hurd, and we hope to build on this as we continue to raise awareness of the vital work FareShare does so well.

For more photos from the day, visit our Million Meals Appeal gallery on Flickr.