Grundon has marked Food Waste Action Week (18-24 March) by launching a new corporate volunteering programme with London-based food redistribution charity The Felix Project.
Every month, Grundon employees will have the chance to lend a hand at any one of the charity’s four locations across the capital, building on a relationship that has seen Grundon provide free waste collection services for the last eight years.
Alex Grant, Grundon’s Sustainability Manager, who has already spent time volunteering, explains: “Having seen the great work that The Felix Project does first-hand, we’re thrilled to extend our corporate partnership by enabling our employees to volunteer for such a good cause.
“The amount of perfectly good food that, for whatever reason is thrown away, is incredibly wasteful, as well as being bad for the environment. The charity does a tremendous job in collecting, sorting, cooking and redistributing surplus food to those in need and we are very pleased to support them in whatever way we can.”
Chris Auchterlonie, Community and Content Lead at The Felix Project, said: “We really appreciate Grundon’s support and are very pleased to welcome them to our volunteer programme.
“Having additional volunteers helps free up our own resources so we can get on with sourcing and redistributing more food, while having free waste collections helps take the financial pressure off. I think it also helps with our sustainability message as we can use Grundon’s expertise to improve efficiencies within our waste and recycling processes, so this is good news for all of us.”
Chris Auchterlonie
Community and Content Lead at The Felix Project
Over the past year, thanks to Grundon’s free collections of the charity’s general waste, mixed recycling and food waste, the charity has saved over £9,000 in disposal costs and cut CO2 emissions by more than 47,000kgs, a move that has helped boost its sustainability goals. Well over 50% of the 103 tonnes of waste collected has been sent for recycling.
In addition to Grundon employees participating in monthly volunteering days, Alex says its customers will be invited to join in the volunteering programme and, for every customer that signs up, Grundon will make a £10 donation, enough to provide 29 meals.
The Felix Project has warned that 89% of the community organisations it supports expect to see an increased demand for their food services this year and Chris says one in four London families cannot afford to feed their families.
In 2023, the charity rescued over 13,000 tonnes of fresh, nutritious food, worth £53 million from 322 different suppliers. In doing so, it saved over 34,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions.
The food was redistributed to 1,119 community organisations, charities, primary schools and holiday programmes across the capital, where it was enough to create 32 million meals. With depots at Enfield, Park Royal and Deptford, the charity also operates a kitchen at its Poplar base, which last year produced over one million meals.
Typically, the surplus food donated will come from farms, wholesalers, retailers and the hospitality sector. Food donations can be anything from end-of-production lines from food manufacturers, to mislabelled products or excess stock.
In one recent example, the charity ‘rescued’ over 75 tonnes of apples, plums and pears from a farm in Kent, after the farmer realised he would lose tens of thousands of pounds selling his crop to retailers.
He donated the orchard’s entire crop to the charity and volunteers picked the fruit for distribution to hundreds of primary schools and community organisations, with a further 36 tonnes of apples, which weren’t suitable for eating, being turned into over 20,000 bottles of juice.