For six and a half years the brilliant team at Batley Community Outreach Centre has accessed a weekly delivery from our Leeds Regional Centre. In the last 24 months alone our volunteers have provided them with 16.3 tonnes of quality surplus food from 315 food sites across the UK. The estimated retail value of that surplus was £57,000 across that 2 year period, comprised mainly of vegetables, dairy, fruit, bakery, savoury, protein, ready meals and mixed items.

Denise Fotherby shared that “For the last eleven years we have run an Outreach to combat loneliness, but it also serves people who are homeless or on a low income. We started with eighteen meals once a week and we’re now relied upon for eighty meals every Friday.

Frozen surplus helps to maintain our Wellspring programme for the over 55s. This started as coffee and cake, then we provided homemade soup, and now we provide a hot meal for 34 people because of the frozen food from FareShare Yorkshire. This is often pie, chips and peas, topped up with purchases of frozen peas by ourselves, and gives people a substantial meal instead of a snack. It helps isolated people to get out of the house and socialise but it is mainly the food they rely upon.

More people are in need in our community which places more demands on our Outreach. In the past we would bake the pies and have some spare to freeze down but now everything we cook is gone by the end of a Friday, along with the ambient food parcels we provide through FareShare Yorkshire as well.

I don’t think we would be able to do our work without FareShare Yorkshire, it would just be too expensive.”