Biggest ever Silverstone ‘food rescue mission’ for community larder

A group of volunteers have collected and distributed more than ten tonnes of food that would have otherwise been thrown away from the British Grand Prix at Silverstone over the weekend.

Towcester and Roade community larders have collected 10.3 tonnes and are expected to make more collections this week.

Katie Steele, coordinator of Towcester community larder praised the 40 volunteers who helped: “We’ve got a wonderful group here. We work together with the Towcester and Roade larder. We had a mixture of volunteers from both larders and they were just all phenomenal, took it on really positively and had lots of fun along the way.

“By this time last year we had collected around seven tonnes and the fact that we are over 10 tonnes already is really big for us.

“The scale of it this time has been phenomenal.”

The food mainly consisted of fresh fruit and vegetables and other perishable goods.

It has been transported to a pop-up larder at Towcester Football Club Supporters’ Club where members of the larder and local food bank users have been invited to help themselves.

Katie added: “We've had some lovely messages from the community that have said there’s fruit and veg that the kids have never been able to try like passionfruit and things like that that they’ve been able to access during the pop-up sessions.”

The initiative has been greatly appreciated by the public in Towcester and 650 people visited the pop-up larder on Sunday.

Silverstone has been working with the food larders for three years now and 2023’s Grand Prix was a record-breaking ‘food rescue mission’.

“It has been brilliant, we’ve had such a positive response from the community with everybody thanking the volunteers as they are going round and messages that we’ve received via our facebook and email - just very very grateful people,” Katie continued.

“At the moment there’s a lot of people struggling and bills are so high and food is quite expensive in the supermarkets. Being able to get a lot of fresh fruit and veg out there, which people can’t really afford at the moment, is a really good feeling.”

The group collects 3.5 tonnes of food twice a week for the Towcester larder, and weekly for the Roade larder from national supermarkets.

They will return to Silverstone in three weeks time for another food rescue mission at the MotoGP.