A UK charity network that collects good surplus food from the food industry and shares it with thousands of charities and community groups across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
FareShare is the UK's national network of food redistribution charities. Supermarkets, farms, manufacturers and food-service companies often end up with food that is perfectly good to eat but cannot be sold, perhaps because of a labelling mistake or a change in orders. FareShare collects that food, stores it in warehouses and passes it on to charities and community groups, which use it for things like breakfast clubs, lunch clubs, homeless shelters and children's holiday projects. Its own motto is "No good food goes to waste". By 2023/24 the network says it redistributed over 57,000 tonnes of food, equal to about 135 million meals.
The story began in December 1994, when the homelessness charity Crisis teamed up with Sainsbury's to set up Crisis FareShare in London, taking surplus food to hostels and shelters. Marks & Spencer and Pret a Manger were among its first suppliers. The idea spread to other cities, and in 2004 FareShare became an independent charity so it could help many more kinds of groups, not only people experiencing homelessness. The charity describes its aim as relieving food poverty and reducing food waste, and its page says it is about "harnessing the power of food to change lives". It has not published a longer mission statement that we found, so we have not invented one.
FareShare works across the whole of the UK. It runs through a network of regional centres, with around 35 distribution warehouses in 2024. FareShare itself runs three of them, in Merseyside, East Anglia and Southern Central, and independent local charities and partners run the rest. Places named on its pages include London, Brighton, Kent, Thames Valley, Milton Keynes, Birmingham, Bristol, Leicester, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle, Cardiff, Belfast, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dundee and Aberdeen. It says it works with more than 9,000 members, and a Wikipedia summary reports over 26,000 volunteers.
Volunteers are at the heart of how FareShare works. People sort stock, pack deliveries and drive vans, and the charity builds a lot of its public profile through campaigns and partnerships with companies such as Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda, Waitrose, the Co-op and M&S. Footballer Marcus Rashford became an ambassador in 2020. It also runs FareChance, a ten-week employability scheme for young people, and FareShare Go, launched in 2015, which links local charities with supermarkets that have unsold food.
The roles in a charity like this are wide. Warehouse and logistics teams handle the food and the vans, food-industry partnership staff build relationships with suppliers, and others work in fundraising, communications and campaigning, data and impact measurement, finance and human resources. Many jobs are in the regions, close to where the food is collected. If you like practical problem-solving, working with communities, or making the case for changes in policy, there is a role to match. Its website lists current vacancies and the local centres you can contact.
Website: fareshare.org.uk
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