On Christmas Eve, Tesco and its food surplus partners FoodCloud and Olio provided nearly 13,000 meals to individuals and families who needed it most in communities nationwide. FoodCloud and Olio, for the first time, redistributed surplus food from all of Tesco’s 164 stores across Ireland. This represented Tesco’s most ambitious Christmas Eve surplus food donations activity to date.
1,800 Food Waste Heroes have signed up to OLIO since partnering with Tesco Ireland in November 2021, and in that time 12,000 collections have been made from its stores, including Nutgrove in Dublin, Mullingar in Co Westmeath and Tuam, Co Galway.
“Last year we made the decision to partner with OLIO to help us further expand our surplus food donation programme,” said Tesco Ireland Communications Director Rosemary Garth.
“This step was another major milestone towards helping us achieve our ambition to ensure that no good food goes to waste. Over the past 12 months working with Olio, 656,000 items of food have been donated and shared with people who need it most.
“We have been donating surplus food to charitable groups through our partnership with FoodCloud since 2014, and I am proud to say that in that time, some 17 million meals have been donated to more than 380 community groups throughout Ireland.”
Working with FoodCloud, and hundreds of charitable groups, Tesco redistributes surplus food to families who need it most in our communities.
FoodCloud technology allows store managers to alert local charitable organisations of the amount of surplus food they have available at the end of each day. The charitable organisations then collect the food from each store, free of charge.
Over 300 charitable organisations are supported annually, and 22,860 CO2 emissions have been saved to date. Donations usually comprise a mix of fresh fruit & veg, bakery, meat and more.
Food donations were also given an added boost thanks to a record-breaking Christmas Food Appeal which saw Tesco colleagues and customers donate €236,000 worth of food to local community organisations in partnership with FoodCloud.
Tesco then topped up the donation figure by 20% to benefit those who need it most this Christmas. This means that over €275,000 worth of food will be donated to charitable groups throughout the country.
