FareShare is calling on the government to offset the costs of charitable food redistribution, which could include re-packing, harvesting, transporting, storage and handling. This would ensure UK charities save £150 million, which they could reinvest into their services and feeding more people, FareShare said.
The charity said at least 270,000 tonnes of good food is thrown away each year in UK food production because it is "more expensive" to redistribute to charities than to send to other processes of disposal.
FareShare chief executive Lindsay Boswell said: “It’s completely wrong that we have a situation where it’s cheaper to send thousands of tonnes of good edible food to anaerobic digestion plants or to animal feed, when there are millions of people experiencing food insecurity and regularly skipping meals across the UK right now.
“FareShare redistributes just 5% of the available surplus food, but with that we help feed half a million people a week – so just imagine what we could do with 100,000 tonnes. This is what France already does, and we know we can do it here too.
“We have the capacity, we know more charities want us to help them – we just need the government to help us access the food.”
The charity currently redistributes around 13,500 tonnes of good quality surplus food to nearly 7,000 charities such as hospices, homeless shelters, children’s breakfast clubs and women’s refuges. FareShare says food becomes surplus because of over-production, packaging malfunctions, labelling errors, over-supply due to favourable growing conditions, unexpected changes in demand and short shelf life.