West Ealing’s Co-op, which closed earlier this month, has donated a tonne’s weight of food, drink and other products worth thousands of pounds to Ealing Foodbank to help people fighting poverty in Ealing.
Owned by Southern Co-op, the retailer closed the Uxbridge Road store, which previously was a Morrisons, due to what it called “challenging market conditions and a significant decline in performance over the last few years.”
Rather than send the remaining stock its other stores, Southern Co-op took a decision to donate to Ealing Foodbank, part of The Trussell Trust.
Hilary Padmore, Warehouse Manager at Ealing Foodbank, said: “We distribute around 20 tonnes of food a month so this donation will obviously make a difference. Most of it was extremely useful.”
Ms Padmore added: “At the moment we are feeding around 3,500 people a month but we are expecting this to increase over the next few months. There is a huge variety of people who we support – single people, families and couples from all sorts of backgrounds. Six or seven years ago, the majority of people were unemployed but we have seen a significant shift to households where at least one person is working.”
Holly Bramble, Community Lead for Southern Co-op said: “Food banks provide vital support for our local communities so this donation is just one way in which we can say thank you. We’d also like to thank all of our customers who continue to donate food via the donation points in our stores to local community food banks. With their help, we currently support more than 60 local community food banks.”
Ms Bramble added that through its customer membership programme, local foodbanks benefit: “Via our membership cards, we donate 2p to our local community foodbank partners whenever members buy food, drink or groceries in our stores.”
