03/10/2026
Week 11: You never quite know what you’re going to get! 🍓
What a week it’s been! Just when we thought we’d seen the peak of the autumn food surplus, along came Friday evening and a rather unexpected surprise!
One of the things about running a Community Fridge is that you never quite know how much food you’re going to get. We have a regular schedule of around 10 collections each week, but the quantities can vary enormously.
Our weekly allocation from SOFEA is 100 kg, and we’re often fortunate enough to receive additional surplus. This week we received an extra 30 kg, which we’re really grateful for, although it was less than usual. Our collections from Sainsbury’s and Co-op were also quieter. Quality overall remains good!
By Friday afternoon, we’d collected around 200 kg of food.
That’s our minimum weekly target, so we were doing fine. But with two scheduled collections still to go, we decided to accept an additional waitlist collection at Tesco Dunstable Extra.
We thought a little extra food would be welcome, and that turned out to be quite an understatement! 😂
Andy S and Lyn arrived at Tesco to discover that the team had not one, but TWO cages of surplus food waiting for us!
Amongst it all were 12 trays of strawberries. That’s an incredible 160 punnets! 🍓🍓🍓
Suddenly, our relatively quiet week had taken a rather unexpected turn.
Then came the challenge of getting everything into the car. Thankfully, it’s a big car, although even that was pushed to its limits!
And the logistical challenges didn’t end there. By Saturday morning, we had so much food at our operational base that it again took THREE cars to transport everything to Wilkinson Hall.
Our volunteers then had to get everything unloaded, organised and ready for opening at 9:30am.
And what a morning it was! We welcomed 90 visitors through the doors, sharing an enormous amount of good food with our community. As usual, there was minimal food left at the end of the food share session
This is what makes food redistribution so unpredictable, but also makes this a fun service to be part of.
Some weeks our collection partners have very little surplus available. Other weeks, enormous quantities of perfectly good food become available at very short notice. We have to be flexible, make quick decisions and occasionally get rather creative with packing the cars!
A big thank you to Tesco Dunstable Extra for Friday’s unexpected collection, to all our regular collection partners, and especially to our volunteers who make everything happen behind the scenes and on a Saturday morning.
We thought last week was our autumn peak, but it seems the season of abundance isn’t quite finished with us yet!
We know these levels of surplus won’t continue through the winter. But while this good food is available, we’ll keep doing everything we can to make sure it reaches our community rather than going to waste.
💜
Reducing food waste. Supporting people.
