Fresh fruit and veg initiative launched by Salisbury Foodbank
They've teamed up with a local company
Salisbury Foodbank say they are delighted to be offering fresh fruit and veg to people in need in the city.
They've joined forces with Central Fruits, who are supplying and delivering the boxes for the charity.
Foodbank manager Maria Stevenson says they've been looking to offer this for a long time and improve their offering of a normal parcel which provides three meals a day for three days.
Central Fruits are given the details of people who need them by the foodbank and they prepare and deliver it.
It can't be offered to everyone, but it's hoped the service will be expanded to more people.
They launched last Monday (12th September) and so far have given out over 20 fresh fruit and veg parcels.
Maria Stevenson, Salisbury Foodbank Manager, said:
"It's a really exciting opportunity to for us to work with Central Fruits, we've wanted to give more to people who access the foodbank for a very long time and at the moment people receive just an ambient food parcel, 3 meals a day for three days and it was always the intention to increase this offering to fresh food.
"There's a lot of waste involved with fresh fruit and veg, and the benefits of it being additional vitamins and minerals going directly to the people that probably need it most. It would have cost us probably a lot more to install any refrigeration as we deal predominantly with ambient food here. So we would have had to increase our food awareness within our teams, then we would have to consider how do we get that food out to our foodbank settings for people to take and by offering a home delivery service that Matt is providing for us at Central Fruits he's taken all that risk away from us. He's taking the risk of food wastage away from us as well, which is another important thing that we wanted to avoid."
"Scary" numbers of demand
Earlier this week, Salisbury Foodbank had already supported 437 people in September alone, with 40% of those being children.
Last year they fed 390 throughout the whole month.
Maria says this is a "scary figure" and it is looking quite likely that they will feed over 800 people.
August already hit record numbers with 745 people needing help from the foodbank.
Maria is calling on anyone who can support, to do so:
"We're very busy in our warehouse and we will be up until October and if there's anybody out there who can support either our harvest or when you're going shopping can add an item or two into the shopping cart for the food bank, we'd really appreciate it now more than ever. I think we gave out two tonnes more stock than we accepted last month and we are going to a readdress that trend with harvest this year.
"But on the flip side of that, if people are struggling please know that there are whole host of charities out there that can support you and the foodbank is just one food charity in the city."