Chichester charity UKHarvest preventing food wastage

What is UKHarvest?

We are a not-for-profit environmental food rescue charity based in Chichester. We collect quality excess food from commercial outlets and deliver it, free of charge, to charities and organisations feeding vulnerable people. We support more than 110 charities, delivering 27,500 meals per week, saving more than 705 tons of good food from going to landfill. Our mission in the UK is to ‘Nourish our Nation’: eliminating hunger and food waste through the redistribution of good food, educating and engaging with communities and inspiring innovation.

What are ‘Surplus Suppers’?

Provided by UKHarvest’s pop-up restaurants, we offer Surplus Suppers to communities to help target social isolation. With one in four low-income households in the UK struggling to eat regularly or healthily, we aim to provide access to good quality, nutritious meals cooked with care, using rescued food. In West Sussex alone, 60,000 tonnes of food is sent to land fill each year and 40,000 is edible. We operate a ‘donate as you dine’ system –guests pay what they can.

What are UKHarvest’s NourishEd learning programmes all about?

Education is at the core of what we do. Our programmes focus on food literacy and address key issues. Supporting individuals, families and communities to live well and to come together and share their cultures, to problem solve and to nourish their lives, courses are adaptable for a range of people and needs.

What is the project you are about to launch?

In November we will collaborate with The Regis School in Bognor. The school has made us the recipient of their annual Food Drive and students from ten schools will be donating their Harvest Festival food to UKHarvest in order to provide a meal for someone in need. Once we have collected and weighed all of the tins, we will be distributing them to the 111 charities we support. We are creating a film of the whole day showcasing some of the work we do and celebrating the support we have. What is really lovely is the students will be writing labels to stick on their tin with a message for the person/charity it will be going to. The next step is to take the film back into the schools to show them what a difference they have made.

What are you hoping to collect?

We hope about three-plus tons of food! After weighing the donated food, we aim to create a large UKHarvest logo from the collected tins, to promote the event and to highlight the scale of the food collected.

How can people get involved/help?

We are always looking for new volunteers. There is always a broad range of activities for people to get involved with. Find out more at www.ukharvest.org.uk/donate-time