New Home for FareShare Depot!
Today we are pleased to announce that the FareShare surplus food depot has found a new home in Seafield, Edinburgh. The larger site will allow us to deliver five times more food to community groups and charities supporting those in need.
The depot has been run by Cyrenians for 25 years, connecting communities throughout Central and South-East Scotland to good quality food that otherwise would have been sent to landfill. The team works in partnership with FareShare, a charity dedicated to mitigating food waste, by working with major retailers and suppliers such as The Co-op, Tesco and Asda to redirect high quality food to those who need it most.
Since the pandemic in 2020, the need for fresh affordable food has been steadily increasing. 200,000 tonnes of good to eat food going to waste across Scottish food industry every year, when it could instead be going to support people in need. Last year, the Edinburgh depot team were able to deliver 2 million meals, saving over 800 tonnes of food from landfill, despite having very little room to manoeuvre. By expanding capacity more of this food could be going to strengthening communities throughout Central and South East Scotland.
The new location in Seafield will be able to turn over five times more than the smaller depot and will soon be offering accredited forklift training as part of an employability programme – a huge step forward in both Cyrenians and FareShare’s mission.
Lynne Collie, Senior Enterprise Manager, said: “When the cost of not having access to healthy and nutritious food is so high and with food poverty and food insecurity being a real concern in Scotland, the Cyrenians FareShare team are very excited about our move to the new depot in Seafield. We now have a custom-built space that will allow us to not only distribute more surplus food by increasing our capacity to take more ambient, chilled and frozen products. It will also give us the opportunity to give people the skills they need to access new job opportunities, in a live warehousing environment. This larger depot enables us to enhance our training offering through employability courses and our new RTITB accredited forklift training.”