His Food: helping out the hungry... under cover

In an aircraft hangar somewhere in the UK, pallets of household name goods are stacked on top of one another as far as the eye can see. Nothing extraordinary about that you might think. However, this is no ordinary operation. The hangar owner asks The Grocer not to divulge the exact location of this facility. Should its whereabouts become known by the wrong people, the whole operation - which processes millions of pounds’ worth of goods every year and lists most of the UK’s biggest food and drink players among its clients - would be put at risk, he says darkly. It’s a serious business.

Except it’s not a business. The hangar is operated by the charity His Food and is aimed at putting the mountains of food, clothing, toys and other perfectly good products that are thrown away by British businesses each year to better use by redistributing them to needy causes across Britain and as far afield as Liberia and Moldova.

Dodging criminal gangs
The reason for the secrecy is that although the food the charity redistributes comes direct from manufacturers and supermarkets, many of the clothes it processes are counterfeit items seized by police and trading standards from gangs of criminals - not the sort of people you want knocking on your door asking for their property back.

The charity didn’t start out dealing with dodgy gear however. His Food was founded almost by accident eight years ago when members of the Christian group His Church visited a branch of Morrisons to collect an £8 voucher on behalf of the more than 250 charities the group supports. At the store, group members noticed half a pallet of canned soup that had been set aside and was destined for the bin because the tins bore out of date labels that had since been redesigned. The group spied an opportunity and left the supermarket £8 and a load of soup better off.

“This gave us an idea,” says Richard Humphrey, senior co-ordinator at the charity. “We phoned around all the food manufacturers asking if we could provide a solution for all their surplus stock. Our next donation was 26 pallets of Baxters Soup. We hired a lorry to go up to Scotland and pick them up. Next we invested in 40 shipping containers. When we started we were operating out of an office in a shipping container. Now we have this 50,000 sq ft aircraft hangar.”

Fmcg manufacturers - from Premier Foods to Procter & Gamble - help to fill the depot with products every month. Stock varies wildly. Past consignments include 32 pallets of Co-op Truly Irresistible pasta in the wrong size packs, 14 pallets of Alpen cereal bars (each item was one gramme lighter than labelled) and 80,000 jars of curry sauce on which the word ‘Masala’ had been misspelled.

As irksome as these mistakes may be for manufacturers, His Food allows them to offset the pain to some degree by contributing to such a worthy cause. But there’s more to it than just taking surplus or redundant stock off their hands, according to Humphrey.

“Rather than go in as a charity, we provide solutions for businesses and at the same time help them achieve their CSR goals,” he explains. “If a supermarket pulls a promotion, the manufacturer is stuffed. If they sell it through the grey market it can really harm their brand. We provide an alternative that can protect their brand and give them some great PR.”

At the moment, the charity is focused on processing surplus stock from the likes of Nestlé, Unilever, and Kellogg’s, but now it is looking to begin regular collections from individual supermarkets across the country to help put the estimated 5.3 million tonnes of still-edible food that is thrown away each year to better use.

Lengthy supply chain
Humphrey is currently in talks with two of the country’s biggest supermarkets about running regular collections of surplus food, which has to be ambient because of the length of His Food’s supply chain (FareShare, by contrast, redistributes only in the UK so can collect fresh food).

“Because we work with 90% of trading standards we have a logistics network with which we can do collections anywhere,” he says. “The solutions can be at store level. There’s enough capacity to make sure that this food doesn’t go to waste. There is the potential to do this with all the supermarkets. It could be absolutely huge.”

The only problem is, the bigger a secret gets, the harder it is to keep.