Supporting City Harvest – Helping Others Reap What We Sow

Working in the consumer products and retail practice at AlixPartners continues to open our eyes to the challenges businesses face in today’s disrupted world. The severity and frequency of the disruption has enabled us to work on a number of fascinating projects. Like many other businesses, AlixPartners supports its consultants to apply their consulting experience to non-profit organisations as they face similar issues to those discussed in our clients’ boardrooms and offices. Most recently a number of us volunteered at City Harvest – a fantastic charity which aims to address food poverty by redistributing edible surplus food to those in need.

 What we found during our day with the team at City Harvest in Acton prompted us to write this. Raising awareness of the contribution charities like City Harvest make to society is important at the best of times and even more so in the midst of a cost of living crisis. Experiencing the need first hand truly drove home how important charities like City Harvest are in today’s world.

 The use of food banks and other assisted nutrition charities is on the rise. Up to one-third of food bank beneficiaries are thought be ‘new’, having not previously needed to use these services before. As a result, demand is beginning to outstrip supply. Charities like City Harvest who act as food distributors are having to think of creative ways to ‘scale’ their offering, similarly to a high growth consumer business, to help support this growing need.

 But, not only do they need more supplies, the type of food they offer also needs to change. With higher energy bills a worryingly large number of people is facing a genuine dilemma whether to ‘eat or heat’. This leads to situations where potential beneficiaries of food banks decline certain foods due to their energy consumption profile e.g., whole potatoes as they typically need to be boiled. The implication for food distributors like City Harvest is a possible change in ‘product mix’, focusing more on ready meals or deli items that require minimal cooking time and energy consumption. Creating a regular, informal feedback loop with food banks is a critical step at present due to the rapidly increasing demand.

 Being able to deploy the skills we as a team developed over many years to help City Harvest think through how they can optimise and scale their efforts was incredibly rewarding. However, it really is a very small tip to a very large iceberg so if you’re interested in helping City Harvest or similar charities, here are our thoughts on how to engage:

1.      Donate: £1 feeds four people - You can donate to City Harvest here

2.      Spread the word: Raising awareness of the existence of charities like City Harvest helps them raise funds and recruit new volunteers

3.      Volunteer: These organisations regularly face shortages of labour, so volunteering makes an immediate difference to the throughput of these charitable groups, even for a single day. City Harvest is always looking for volunteers. Or, you can find a local foodbank through The Trussell Trust’s website.

4.      Share your knowledge: These charitable groups often need the help of skilled individuals with knowledge of, for example, logistics or digital tools. Partnering with charities like City Harvest in this way could help them improve productivity and planning and provide additional bandwidth.