Culina Logistics is now working in partnership with food redistribution charity FareShare to help tackle food waste and hunger.
Culina’s customers often have surplus food that FareShare could use and that never reaches consumers because of problems including: forecasting, mislabelling or promotional items not selling as well as expected.
By sending waste food to FareShare, the logistics company can save additional costs for its customers, for example: return of food, collection costs for food bins, landfill tax and labour to remove packaging.
“We already have some big brands that have agreed to contribute stock to FareShare as opposed to disposing of it and we are adding more daily,” said Sian Davies, Culina Logistics supervisor, who leads the project. “By sending surplus stock to FareShare, Culina Logistics clients are actually saving money.
“We find that the biggest barrier for food companies sending surplus stock to charities is the cost of transporting it.
“If making your company’s surplus food available to FareShare is actually cheaper thank disposing of it, then it’s a no brainer. This is what Culina Logistics have made possible for our clients. This is something we want to highlight, so we can encourage others in the industry to follow suit, essentially making it easy and financially viable to do the right thing with surplus food.”
Mark Varney, director of network development at FareShare added: “So far nineteen Culina Logistics client companies are now providing their surplus food to FareShare which is fantastic progress. The brilliant thing about our relationship is that Culina Logistics customers aren’t just made aware of FareShare, they are also incentivised to work with us.”
Culina’s customer Innocent is working with FareShare and has said the system is extremely rewarding. Leonie Straatman, head of warehousing logistics at Innocent said, “When it comes to our drinks, we’re really keen to make sure that nothing goes to waste, so we’ve been working with FareShare to help deliver juice and smoothies to people who really need them.
“We’re chuffed to say that we recently a hit a milestone with FareShare and have now provided over 1.5 million portions of fruit to people who need it the most. Partnering with FareShare works so well for us that we asked our warehousing partner Culina Logistics to share our process and successes with their other clients, to show them it’s easier than they might think.”
