KFC teams up with FareShare for national food redistribution scheme

KFC UK & Ireland has joined forces with charity FareShare in a new food redistribution partnership, pledging to redistribute the equivalent of four million meals by the end of the year.

Using learnings from a recent pilot, all 1,000 of KFC UK & Ireland’s restaurants will begin redistributing unsold food and drink through FareShare by the end of 2022.

The business has stated that it intends to ensure all unsold food is redistributed to local communities, including frozen products as well as hot and ambient food and drinks.

The fast-food giant piloted a tie-up with FareShare across 20 restaurants from late 2021. Over an eight-month trial period, the equivalent of 27,500 meals were made available to 22 community groups across the Midlands, the North East of England and Essex. Each participating restaurant made 69 kilograms of food available to FareShare each week during the pilot.

FareShare’s pilot with KFC saw community groups notified via an app, called FareShare Go, of what foods were available in real time from their local KFC branch. They could then choose whether to accept the offer and set the food aside for collection. Each KFC branch had three collection dates booked each week.

“We’ve seen more and more people in the local communities that we serve being plunged into food insecurity and, as the cost of living crisis intensifies, it is more important than ever that we make sure any surplus food gets to the people who need it most,” said KFC’s chief corporate affairs and sustainability officer Jenny Packwood.

“We want to move fast and hard on rolling out our food redistribution programme by the end of the year, and across all of our restaurants, because we cannot sit by while our communities suffer… By redistributing our surplus fried chicken, we’ll not only be tackling food insecurity, but we’ll also be taking an important step towards our goal of become a fully circular, zero-waste business by 2035.”