It was announced today that Tesco Ireland’s innovative surplus food donations programme has redistributed over two million meals to 195 charities and support groups since its launch in July 2014. This equates to over 20,000 meals donated to causes every week. 

Charities that have benefited from this initiative include local community centres, addiction rehabilitation services, homelessness charities, women’s refuges, elderly support centres, children and youth organisations.

At present 109 of Tesco’s 148 Irish stores (73%) support local good causes with surplus food donations with the retailer planning to introduce their programme into all of its Irish stores by the end of 2016.

With 2 million meals redistributed to date, equating to over 1000 tonnes of food, Tesco is encouraging more good causes across Ireland to sign up and take part in this initiative. 

Corporate Affairs Director Tesco Ireland, Christine Heffernan says, "Even in the most efficient retail operations, there will inevitably be surplus food and we are thrilled to be making a valuable contribution to local communities enabling charities to focus on the vital services they provide."

She added, "Our aim is to achieve full roll out of this partnership to all of our 148 stores by the end of 2016. We encourage any charity that can benefit from this partnership to register via food.cloud."

Source: www.businessworld.ie