October 2018

Our Food Redistribution Centre has opened a new base to deliver meals to communities in North Cumbria.

We are now delivering food to the Harraby Community Centre in Carlisle, for charitable groups to collect goods to make meals for communities.

Member groups receive a range of fresh, frozen and luxury in-date goods which is surplus from supermarkets and food suppliers. Paying a modest monthly fee, these Community Food Members (CFMs) will save an average of £7,900 on food costs annually through membership.

Working in partnership with national charity FareShare, we currently redistribute up to 13,000 meals a week to feed 9,000 people across Cumbria and Lancashire, diverting hundreds of tonnes of surplus food from becoming waste each year.

This new base has been supported by Cumbria County Council and Harraby Community Centre to open the Local Collection Point (LCP) as part of our expansion from our main Centre, based in Lancashire. We are already delivering goods to Cleator Moor near Workington and Rheged near Penrith, supporting a total of 46 groups across the county.

Jeff Green, manager of the Food Redistribution Centre, said: “We’re really proud to be able to support community groups in the Carlisle area to be able to deliver fresh, quality food. Our work is about more than just food. The goods we deliver allow groups to make savings, invest their resources in other services, expand their offer to communities and feed disadvantaged and vulnerable communities; allowing them to do even more great work to help others.”

We opened our first LCP in Cumbria, in Cleator Moor, in October 2017, and have since delivered more than 54,000 meals to groups. And we have delivered more than 19,000 meals to its second LCP in Rheged since opening in December 2017.

Our Food Redistribution Centre has delivered more than 2.5million meals to date, supporting more than 160 groups across the two counties, including homeless shelters, hospices, breakfast clubs and community centres.