Fareshare is tackling the crime of waste

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Up on the shelf there were six full pallets of breakfast cereal. Fareshare, the food re-distribution charity based in south London, has received 200 such pallets this month from the same source, equating to just under 80,000 boxes of cereal which would otherwise have been sent to landfill. The cereal had ended up in Fareshare because the supermarket that originally ordered it about a year ago had revised its order downwards and the manufacturer was left with an enormous amount of surplus breakfast food in its warehouse.

Fareshare has been a charity since 2004 and it is a simple idea. Get hold of the food that is wasted at the manufacturing end of the chain and give it away to the homeless and the very poor. Since that date, the charity has redistributed 8,800 tons of food, provided more than 13. 5 million meals and reduced carbon emissions by 57 per cent. Even so, it's a drop in the ocean.

Fareshare's Jonathan Pelluet estimates that the UK food sector produces some 17 million tons of food waste every year. About 75 per cent of that is genuine waste and cannot be eaten. But 25 per cent of it is fine: maybe near its sell-by date, but perfectly edible. Fareshare gets just one per cent of that 25 per cent. Even though supermarkets blithely claim to redistribute all their wasted food, back at the manufacturing end this is still just an option, not an automatic part of the system.

Inside the warehouse, there is a vast array of food waiting to be repacked into plastic trays and loaded into a van which will deliver it to homeless centres around London: capers, Belgian chocolate, Dorset cereal, mangoes and bananas, olives, bread, butter, instant stuffing mix, Bisto gravy. It's a bit like a very chaotic shop which sells everything you might need if only you knew where to look.

The homeless centres place an order in the morning and the food is on their doorstep by the afternoon. There's a stack of fruit juice boxes in one corner. Fareshare currently receives all the surplus product from one major manufacturer. The company only wastes 0.04 per cent each year, but as they make more than 800 million litres, this tiny amount adds up to 320,000 litres. The olives I found in another box had been sent to Fareshare because some of the olives in the jars were damaged: the best before date was 2012.

Pelluet says Fareshare provides food for 70 community organisations, including hostels for the homeless and night shelters. A second depot is due to open near Park Royal by the end of the year which will allow them to support another 30 organisations. Eighteen months ago now,
I spent 10 days living on the streets of London as part of a homeless documentary for the BBC. I ate a few meals in night shelters and other facilities set up to help people on our city streets. Maybe some of it passed through Fareshare. It's a brilliant charity, serving a huge need and helping the environment at the same time.