International supply chain and logistics consultancy SCALA has partnered with food redistribution charity FareShare to assist the organisation with its logistics strategy.  

Through the partnership, SCALA has supported FareShare on a wide range of complex issues, such as how the charity could manage the major increase in received food volumes over the past year as well as how the not-for-profit can manage the volumes that are anticipated to grow in the future. FareShare’s team of 2000 volunteers has distributed the equivalent of 132 million meals with a value to the charities it serves of £18 million in the last year.  

FareShare is the UK’s largest food redistribution charity, with more than 30 warehouses across the UK. The charity takes food from the food industry that cannot be sold in shops because of packaging errors, short shelf life, or overproduction and redistributes it through a network of over 11,000 frontline organisations, including homeless hostels, school breakfast clubs, domestic violence refuges, older people’s lunch clubs, food banks, and hospices.  

 SCALA has assisted FareShare by analysing the efficiency of the organisation’s entire supply chain strategy.

The challenges that SCALA had to take into consideration for this strategy included, the difficulties for FareShare in forecasting volumes; the need to be extremely responsive and agile and dealing with the variety of products the charity distributes including frozen, ambient and chilled goods. Furthermore, the business also had to take into account the need to minimise any food waste within the FareShare network, by rapidly moving donations to charities right across the country. 

FareShare has more than doubled its work since the pandemic, providing the equivalent of more than two million meals a week to people who struggle to get enough to eat. 

Dave Howorth, executive director at SCALA said: “FareShare operates in a highly challenging logistics environment, particularly with the many unknowns around supply and the need for extreme responsiveness to minimise food waste and maximise the availability of food to those in need. 

“We have been able to work alongside FareShare over the past few months and have supported the organisation in navigating some of these challenges. It’s been great to support FareShare in helping further the organisations’ mission to get food to those that need it across the UK.” 

Jo Dyson, head of food at FareShare said: “We are delighted to be working with SCALA and really appreciate their support for FareShare. They have really taken the time to understand us, both as a charity with scarce resources and in terms of the additional challenges that come from managing surplus products where the supply chain is so much harder to predict. They have provided us with independent expertise and good insights as to how we should progress, and they are continuing to help us on our mission.” 

For more information about SCALA, please visit https://www.scalagroup.co.uk/. 

For more information about FareShare, please visit https://fareshare.org.uk/.