How did food redistribution charities cope with Christmas of Omicron?

The fact this period of peak demand coincided with the Omicron only made matters worse, unleashing more uncertainty on the sector and prompting emergency talks between supermarket leaders, suppliers and Defra over the potential impact.

So how did food waste redistribution charities cope? And were their worst fears realised?

Despite the challenges, organisations report receiving and redistributing similar or higher levels of surplus food levels compared a year earlier.

Between 20 December 2021 and 2 January 2022, FareShare’s warehouses redistributed 1,130 tonnes, the equivalent to 2.7 million meals, to 2,705 charities – up 8% on the same period the year before.

Neighbourly received 1,100 tonnes of surplus food from the retailers, equivalent to more than 2.6 million meals, in the same latest two-week period. The group has been unable to provide comparable figures for Christmas 2020, but says on a like-for-like basis, donations from the retailers it worked with in both periods were “slightly higher” this Christmas.

The Felix Project redistributed three million meals in December, which it says is on par with the years before.

These figures are in no small part thanks to supermarkets ramping up food donation programmes.

Their efforts cap a year in which “despite the challenges, our suppliers stepped up in 2021 to ensure we could continue to feed London and, as a result, we delivered nine million extra meals” says The Felix Project’s director of operations, Shane Dorsett.

FareShare Yorkshire head of development Jonathan Williams adds: “We’ve seen food partners work extremely hard to ensure their stock still reaches a FareShare centre with as much useful life as possible.”

All this is not to say the challenges have come without cost. Getting food to Fareshare centres in time has been “incredibly difficult, like never before”, particularly “chilled milk and meat, and fresh vegetables”, says Williams.

And while redistribution levels are said to have held up, FareShare believes it was “still less than it could be” thanks to the impact of covid absences on retailers and the HGV driver shortage.

Volunteer shortages

Ironically, the biggest challenge for many charities turned out to be the impact of Omicron on their own staff and volunteers.

Neighbourly, which works with supermarkets such as Sainsbury’s, Aldi and Lidl, says availability of surplus food was not a major issue, but “there were challenges for charities with the logistics and onward redistribution due to Covid” – with some local groups even having to close.

“We were made aware of issues with charities being unable to collect due to volunteer and driver availability, and of some groups that had to unexpectedly close due to insufficient staff numbers,” says a Neighbourly spokeswoman.

In such cases, the organisation says it diverted surplus to alternative groups so it wasn’t wasted, says Neighbourly CEO Steve Butterworth.

London-based charity network The Felix Project also struggled with a shortage of hands. The impact was “felt most keenly in our volunteering”, says the charity. In 2020, it filled almost 100% of its volunteering shifts. In contrast, only 63% of shifts were filled in December 2021, and a number of those were cancelled due to Covid absences.

“We lost the majority of the corporate volunteer bookings overnight,” says marketing and digital manager Amy Heritage, referring to people who sign up to help The Felix Project via their companies’ volunteering programmes.

The charity was forced to use temporary paid staff to take up the slack and was “luckily able to fill all volunteering spaces for the busy Christmas period” following an emergency call out.

FareShare proved better positioned, taking lessons from a year earlier, as it opened its warehouses for more days over the Christmas period and lengthened operating hours to give it greater capacity to process donations. FareShare also had back-up teams working from home, ready to step up in the event of a major warehouse outbreak, as well as more volunteers waiting in the wings.

“Because of our learnings from our experience last Christmas, the FareShare network was well prepared to deal with the few volunteers and staff who needed to go into isolation over Christmas, so our food redistribution operations continued apace,” Boswell says.

The power of frozen

FareShare’s response to the supply chain challenges of 2021 has also included ramping up its frozen food operation. FareShare Yorkshire has gone from supplying its local partners with a tonne of frozen food a month to nearly a tonne a day since it added a freezer van to its chilled fleet in February. They also increased freezer storage in the Yorkshire centre, and are getting another freezer van in May this year.

Having started the pandemic with four pallet spaces for frozen food, it is now expected to have 43 by the April. The changes have allowed it to deliver 124 tonnes of frozen food to 97 frontline charities over the past 10 months.

It now plans to roll the initiative out across the network. FareShare’s head of frozen, Fiona Robertson, says FareShare UK is aiming to have about 300 frozen pallet spaces in its nationwide network by the spring.