Helping serve a million meals

Recycling Lives has hit the milestone of delivering one million meals from its Food Redistribution Centre –supplying quality food via charitable groups like homeless shelters, schools breakfast clubs, including HIS Provision Community Café in Revoe.

The social business, which has sites across Lancashire, uses its commercial recycling and waste management operations to support and sustain a number of charitable ventures, including the Centre - the Lancashire and Cumbria arm of national charity FareShare.

The Food Redistribution Centre has been working with HIS Provision since October 2015, supplying it with goods to share with families and those at risk of food poverty.

It serves a free family meal twice a week to around 90 people and puts on a £1 breakfast for 70 people on Saturday mornings.

Project co-ordinator Christine Phillips, said: “This food has had an enormous impact on our users. It used to cost us £150 a week for food. We can now do far more and produce varied menus for just £20 per week. These savings are then used in various other ways.

“We have a food pantry where the first parcel is free to those in-need and then future parcels are exchanged for voluntary activities. Users help out in all kinds of ways from cleaning, to painting the walls and gardening. Receiving the surplus food has helped enormously to create a truly co-operative way of doing things.”

Blackpool Food Partnership receives weekly supplies from the Food Redistribution Centre, allowing it to share these goods with 50 other organisations across the resort.

Manager James Reid said: “It’s a great injection of fabulous fresh product that would otherwise have been binned. This is helping children’s centres and community kitchens across

Blackpool meet the challenges they face daily allowing them to concentrate on doing what they do best.”