Tesco stores in Inverness are joining hundreds of others across the UK this weekend to celebrate four years of the supermarket’s surplus food donation scheme.
Next Saturday colleagues in the Inverness Extra, Inverness Inshes Extra and Inverness Ness Side stores will be showcasing the Community Food Connection scheme, which is run in conjunction with leading food charity FareShare.
They will be talking to customers about how the scheme works to provide free surplus food, and inviting local charities and community groups who already receive food from the scheme to encourage even more to sign up.
The Community Food Connection scheme ensures that every Tesco store in the UK is able to donate surplus food at the end of the day to charities and community groups.
It uses an innovative app developed by social enterprise FoodCloud, to notify groups each night about the food available for collection.
More than 7,000 groups are currently able to pick up free food from their local Tesco store.
More than a million meals a month are now being donated, with the Inverness stores having donated 39,724 to date.
Alec Brown, head of community at Tesco, said: “At Tesco we firmly believe that no good food should go to waste that is why we set up our Community Food Connection scheme, which ensures that our surplus food is put to good use in the local community.
“We are celebrating four years of the scheme with our colleagues and customers and we hope this will encourage more groups to sign up so that even more surplus food benefits local groups.”
FareShare chief executive Lindsay Boswell added: “The food that Tesco donates makes a really makes a big difference to local charities and communities across the UK.
“We are proud to have been able to work with Tesco over the past four years to create this pioneering scheme, which is the biggest of its kind in the UK.
“We hope that by celebrating this milestone with Tesco colleagues and customers we can reach out to even more charities and community groups so that they can receive the free surplus food that Tesco is able to offer.”