Over the last couple of months Liberation has been all about the glamorous new-look, the fancy new packaging, the spangly new website and big visions for the future. But whilst the little nut characters are soon to be fully retired, they are making one last outing...
Several of the old cases (232 to be precise - that’s 2,320 packs) were leftover with a looming Best Before date. But the idea of throwing away these perfectly good, actually delicious, snacks was ludicrous.
A few food waste facts:
- 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted each year. This makes 3.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide through production (growing, harvesting, transporting and packaging).
- Disposal of food waste in landfill produces something called GHG emissions, particularly methane (which is 84 times more harmful that CO2).
- The UK produces the highest amount of food waste in Europe and yet over 5 million people in the UK struggle to get enough to eat.
It makes no sense.
There are a lot of fantastic people, social enterprises, businesses and charities in the UK who are already working hard to tackle this wholly unnecessary problem .
(To name but a few: Toast Ale, Rubies in the Rubble, Oddbox, Marcus Rashford, Too Good To Go, Fare Share – the list goes on.)
And of course, Liberation also wants to counteract, rather than contribute to, the problem.
In an ideal world there would be no leftover nuts or food waste and definitely nobody struggling to have enough to eat. But whilst that gaping hole urgently needs some serious plugging, here we are.
So, returning to the little nut characters, the Liberation team have donated those 2,000+ bags to City Harvest London, a charity that redistributes surplus food from manufacturers, suppliers and retailers to over 350 charities.
Since 2020 City Harvest has tripled in size to meet the demand of people facing food poverty- a tragic figure in itself- but free food goes into 1 million meals a month for homeless shelters, hostels, soup kitchens, mental health charities, the elderly, community kitchens, schools, family centres, children’s programmes, and domestic abuse and refugee groups.
208 kilos of Liberation nuts are now nestled in green grocery trays and being loaded into vans for distribution. They will offer the equivalent of 494 meals (not act as a meal replacement in itself) and offset 790 kgs of carbon emissions.
Whilst we wish we weren't confronted with the embarrassing realities of food waste, it is good to know that those little legumes can make one more journey and do a bit of good!
