Summer Holiday Food distribution is a success!

4th October 2022

This year 189 families registered to receive a weekly food parcel throughout the summer holidays. In order to make sure that some larger families had sufficient food in their parcels this meant ordering around 250 of each item each week. With 25 items making up each food parcel, this meant our volunteers were unpacking, sorting and stacking over 6000 items most weeks!

Thanks to the generosity and unwavering support from our donors we had sufficient funds to buy the food, which included fresh mince, ham, sausages and cheese as well as non-perishables for the store cupboard. The food was purchased from Tesco’s in Dorchester at a total cost of just over £19000. Natalie, their community champion, worked tirelessly to ensure that all ran smoothly at the supply and delivery end each week. 

Yet again, Thomas Hardye School kindly allowed us to use their premises for two days each week to store, display and distribute the food to families who came up to the school each week to collect it. Huge thanks must go to the site managers who opened up before 7am each morning for us. 

We trialled a new system this year where instead of bagging up the food and handing it out, families walked through with their own bags and were able to select what they needed. This worked well with lots of positive feedback and was also a much more environmentally friendly option. This system also impacted on our costs and savings were made as items that were not needed by a family on a particular week did not need to be re-ordered the following week. All in all, a success!