Asda Food Drive: 17-19 May 2024
Asda is holding a food drive in all large stores and selected supermarket stores across the UK. Colleagues in store, alongside volunteers from our food banks, will be encouraging customers to donate an extra item to help food banks in the Trussell Trust network support people experiencing financial hardship. All the donations received during the weekend will kindly be topped up by Asda by 20%*.
If you would like to volunteer at the food drive for your local food bank, please contact them directly.
*The top-up is calculated using an average valuation of £2.37/kg for all items donated.
The impact of our partnership with Asda so far
Our Fight Hunger Create Change partnership with Asda and FareShare was launched in 2018. During that time, the partnership provided valuable support by:
- Providing 1.4 million people with fresh food in addition to the standard three-day emergency food parcel food banks in our network provide.
- Helping to ensure the right support could be there at the right time for people, by providing £5.7 million in grants to more than 200 food banks in our network. These grants have allowed many food banks to provide further practical support like debt and housing advice to help ensure people are less likely to need the support of their local food bank again.
- Funding the most in-depth piece of research into food bank use to date. The research project, State of Hunger, provided eye-opening findings on the true scale of hunger and poverty, its drivers, and the solutions. The findings have been widely used in advocacy and campaigning work with policy makers and the public, to help build better understanding of the structural issues that are pushing so many people deeper into poverty, so we can build a future where everyone has enough money to live on.
- Additionally, when the pandemic first hit in 2020, Asda also provided an additional £2.5 million of funding to help food banks respond to the increase in people needing support. This donation helped us create a new online and telephone referral system, and funded £1 million of grants to help food banks rebuild services and react flexibly to the challenges and pressures of the pandemic throughout 2020 and 2021.
Ongoing support from Asda
Our partnership means Asda customers can donate food and other essential items in selected stores to a food bank in the Trussell Trust network all year round, or during our annual food drive, when food bank volunteers collect donations in-person and talk to customers about their work in the community. Asda’s in store community champions also play a vital role by working with our food banks to drive donations and support volunteers on a local level throughout the year.
These donations make a vital difference to food banks and people who need their support. Over the last decade we’ve seen more people being left without enough money to afford the essentials and needing support from a food bank. And now, after two years of the pandemic, people who were already facing hardship are now facing the impact of the cost of living crisis.
We are grateful to Asda for their ongoing support in the fight against hunger and poverty and look forward to continuing to work together towards a UK without the need for food banks.