In just two years meat producer Cranswick has diverted enough surplus food to create an incredible 100,000 meals for vulnerable people.
Cranswick started working with food charity FareShare in 2017 to send its surplus chicken to frontline charities. Now they redistribute a variety of surplus meat, via FareShare’s Hull & Humber and Yorkshire regional centres.
This meat is then delivered to UK charities including homeless hostels, school breakfast clubs, domestic violence refuges, and older people’s lunch clubs.
This year, Cranswick realised that sausage meat left in the piping at the end of a production run was being sent to anaerobic digestion, when it could be turned into sausages and given to those in need.
"Cranswick is a great example of a food business making a concerted effort to identify harder to reach surplus in its operations and get it onto the plates of people who need it most."
They used FareShare’s Surplus with purpose funding to cover costs of piping the surplus sausage meat into casings, packaging it, labelling it and freezing it, including labour costs.
This helped them to send FareShare enough sausages to help create over 80,000 additional meals.
Claire Burcham, Cranswick Group's Second Nature co-ordinator said: "We’re very proud to work with FareShare, our partnership has enabled Cranswick to provide over 100,000 meals to people who need it most. As a business, Cranswick does a lot of work in our communities local to our sites through our Second Nature strategy and we understand the importance of improving access to nutritious food. FareShare enables us to reach the best possible homes for our surplus food across the whole of the UK.”
Lindsay Boswell, CEO of FareShare added: “Cranswick has been supporting FareShare with regular deliveries of surplus meat for two years now, and this milestone is a testament to its hard work and commitment to tackling food waste. Being able to supply the charities and community groups we support with regular access to good quality meat products is extremely important.
"Cranswick is a great example of a food business making a concerted effort to identify harder to reach surplus in its operations and get it onto the plates of people who need it most. We hope many more businesses will follow Cranswick’s example, and access the Surplus with Purpose Fund to unlock additional surplus that could be sent to good causes.”
This story was originally published on a previous version of the Meat Management website and so there may be some missing images and formatting issues.
