Food Bank Friday 2018

This year’s Food Bank Friday has seen a huge £7,000 worth of products being donated to the Newcastle West End Food Bank!
For the last few years we have run an alternative to Black Friday by donating an item from our stock directly to the food bank with every order over £30, plus we have given our customers 20% off their order. This year was out best ever with 4,289 orders qualifying for the donation!

The 4,289 items going to the Newcastle West End Food Bank were selected based on what the food bank was in need of including tea, sugar, pasta, chopped tomatoes, baked beans, rice and biscuits.

Number of three-day emergency food supplies given by Trussell Trust foodbanks

Since 2015 we have done a similar promotion around Black Friday to highlight the importance of thinking of others who are in need rather than buying that new slightly larger TV which you perhaps don’t need! More and more people are relying on food banks even though the UK is one of the largest economies in the world. Between April and September 2018, 658,048 people used emergency supplies from the Trussell Trust’s foodbank network, which was a 13% higher than the same period in 2017.

A few days before we started our Food Bank Friday campaign, Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights visited the Newcastle West End Food Bank as part of his journey around the UK to examine the impact of austerity. At the end of his 12-day visit he said: “In the fifth richest country in the world, this is not just a disgrace, but a social calamity and an economic disaster, all rolled into one.”

According to his research, 14 million people – a fifth of the population – live in poverty. Four million of these are more than 50% below the poverty line, and 1.5 million are destitute, unable to afford basics essentials. After years of progress poverty is rising again, with child poverty predicted to rise 7% between 2015 and 2022, homelessness is up 60% since 2010, and food banks are rapidly multiplying.

Following his tour of the UK Mr Alston said ministers are in a “state of denial” about poverty, the Government later dismissed the report. At the same time the Department of Work and Pensions has conceded they have no dispute with the statistics used in the report. The full report will be delivered to the UN human rights council in Geneva in 2019.

Little is seemingly being done to alleviate poverty in the UK currently so it is important to help where you can, you can make a donation directly to the Newcastle West End Food Bank, or donate to the Trussell Trust and don’t forget you can add a donation to the food bank with your order on our site, we will add a further 20% to this.