Meeting demand during a vital time whilst giving a helping hand

The background

FareShare is the UK’s national network of charitable food redistributors, made up of 17 independent organisations. Together, they take good quality surplus food from right across the food industry and get it to almost 11,000 frontline charities and community groups. Every week FareShare provides enough food to create almost a million meals for vulnerable people.

The challenge

FareShare is continually growing its regional centres across the UK using a social franchise model.

2019 marked FareShare’s 25^th anniversary of fighting hunger and food waste in the UK; providing food equivalent to 236.8 million meals to people in need.

The charity needed a refrigerated van to meet demand at its centre in Yorkshire and got in touch with CoolKit.

Mark Beaton, Sales Manager at CoolKit said: “Their request was for a single refrigerated van, which was no problem at all, but I recognised there was a bigger picture here and an opportunity to do our bit.”

The solution

After discussion as to how they could help, CoolKit proposed an opportunity to FareShare; to open up a supply partnership for new refrigerated vans, in which CoolKit would make an annual donation based on 1% of the net spend on new vehicle orders that year.

James Persad of FareShare, said: “This was a very generous gesture from CoolKit; we are constantly having to add or replace vehicles to our national fleet, so recognised the value in this offer.

“We are impressed with the consistency and quality of the Cool Kit vans; they have a good payload, enabling us to deliver more food supplies on each journey.”

From the end of June 2019 to March 2020, FareShare ordered 14 Peugeot Boxer vans from CoolKit, offering the lightest conversion on the market.

The pandemic then took hold and demand doubled – seeing FareShare deliver an average of almost two million meals a week to those at risk of hunger through 11,000 frontline charities across the UK.

They made an urgent request to CoolKit to supply two new vans to help meet this unprecedented demand.

Glenn McCulley, CoolKit’s sales and marketing director said: “FareShare is a valued customer

and we knew how vital it was for them to expand this fleet during the pandemic.

“But we had an issue; most of our supply chain partners had closed their doors and we weren’t able to register the vehicles they required.

“We certainly didn’t wish to leave them high and dry, so came up with a solution to loan them our own vans until movement within the manufacturing sector enabled us to get on with the build of their own vehicles.”

James added: “We are working extremely hard to deliver vital food supplies to those in need, so these vans play an extremely important role in ensuring that the food reaches people safely. We are very grateful to CoolKit for their support and generous donation at this difficult time.”

The result

FareShare have since received their own two vehicles and have ordered three more as demand continues to peak, which makes 19 in total. The vans have enabled food to be delivered safely to all those in need across the country.

In the terms of the agreement, this means a total donation of £4,280 will be made from CoolKit to FareShare in June 2020.