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.
We started working with food charity FareShare in 2017 to send our surplus food to frontline charities. We're incredibly proud of this partnership, and in just two years we've diverted enough surplus food to create an incredible 100,000 meals for vulnerable people.
We 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.
For example, in 2019 we 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. We used FareShare’s Surplus with Purpose Funding to cover costs of piping this surplus sausage meat into casings, packaging it, labelling it and freezing it (including labour costs). This action alone enabled them to send enough sausages to help create over 80,000 additional meals.
Lindsay Boswell, CEO of FareShare
“Cranswick have been supporting FareShare with regular deliveries of surplus meat for two years now, and this milestone is a testament to their 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 are a great example of a food business making a concerted effort to identify harder to reach surplus in their 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.”