A £13.6m government funding package is set to convert surplus farm produce into thousands of meals for families facing food insecurity across England — tackling both food waste and food poverty.
Grants have been awarded to 12 food redistribution charities, enabling an estimated 19,000 tonnes of surplus food, much of it sourced directly from farms, to be delivered to community kitchens, food banks, and other charitable organisations.
The funding — awarded to charities including City Harvest, Food in Community, and FareShare — will support the expansion of operations, the purchase of vehicles, volunteer training, and upgrades to storage facilities.
The initiative aims to strengthen partnerships between farmers and charities, ensuring edible food that might otherwise remain unharvested or discarded reaches those in need.
A significant proportion of UK-grown produce is wasted due to cosmetic standards and market specifications, despite its nutritional value remaining intact.
Among the beneficiaries is City Harvest, which provides surplus food to more than 130,000 people each week and has received more than £303,000 through the scheme.
A consortium led by FareShare UK, working with partners including the Felix Project, has secured over £9.2 million to further develop its redistribution network.
Catherine David, CEO of food waste charity WRAP, emphasised the critical role of farm-level redistribution.
"Food waste happens wherever food is grown, made, sold and consumed – from farm to fork.
"Redistributing surplus food from retail and manufacture is a real success story, stopping thousands of tonnes of good food from going to waste every year.
"In 2023, 191,000 tonnes was redistributed worth £764 million — enough to make 456 million meals. Redistributing from farms isn’t so advanced.
"These grants will go a long way to supercharge more charitable networks to capture some of the estimated 330,000 tonnes of food that could be redistributed from UK farms every year."
