New site aims to deliver five times more surplus food to community groups and charities supporting those in need.

Today Cyrenians and FareShare are proud to announce the move of their food surplus depot, from Jane Street in Leith to a much larger facility in Seafield, Edinburgh. The new space marks a significant step forward in Cyrenians and FareShare’s work delivering produce and other vital household items that would otherwise go to waste

For 25 years, the FareShare depot has been a thriving surplus food hub connecting communities throughout Central and South East Scotland to good quality food that otherwise would have been sent to landfill. The team works with major retailers and suppliers such as The Co-op, Tesco and Asda to redirect high quality food to those who need it most.

Since the pandemic in 2020, the need for fresh affordable food has been steadily increasing. 200,000 tonnes of good to eat food going to waste across Scottish food industry every year, when it could instead be going to support people in need throughout the region/country via FareShare. Last year, the depot team were able to deliver 2 million meals, saving over 800 tonnes of food from landfill, despite having very little room to manoeuvre. By expanding FareShare/Cyrenian’s capacity more of this food could be going to strengthening communities throughout Central and South East Scotland.

The new location in Seafield will be able to turn over five times more than the smaller depot and will soon be offering accredited forklift training as part of an employability programme – a huge step forward in both Cyrenians and FareShare’s mission.

Lynne Collie, Senior Enterprise Manager, said: “When the cost of not having access to healthy and nutritious food is so high and with food poverty and food insecurity being a real concern in Scotland the Cyrenians FareShare team are very excited about our move to the new depot in Seafield.  We now have a custom-built space that will allow us to not only distribute more surplus food by increasing our capacity to take more ambient, chilled and frozen products. It will also give us the opportunity to give people the skills they need to access new job opportunities, in a live warehousing environment. This larger depot enables us to enhance our training offering through employability courses and our new RTITB accredited forklift training.”

The depot is run by Edinburgh based Cyrenians, on behalf of FareShare – the UK’s leading food redistribution charity. Cyrenians takes a public health approach to homelessness prevention, understanding that homelessness presents a significant threat to a person’s health, and is often the last in a series of preventable problems including food insecurity. FareShare shares this vision, believing that no one should be facing hunger when 4 million tonnes of food a year are going to waste.

Together, Cyrenians and FareShare are delighted to be able to bring healthy, affordable food to many more people across Central and South East Scotland, whilst helping those in the local community learn vital employability skills.

Kris Gibbon-Walsh, CEO of FareShare said: “Congratulations to all our colleagues at Cyrenians on the launch of this new, bigger and improved site. This larger depot with greater capacity will make a huge difference to the operations, making them safer, allowing employability and training. Most importantly it will help to reach more charities with surplus food, strengthening more local communities and changing lives across Edinburgh and beyond.”

Early Start Event at Cyrenians – See link.