NEARLY 25,000 meals have been donated to the needy by Kingsteignton’s Tesco susperstore in the last four years.

Staff marked the anniversary over the weekend by discussing the scheme’s free food successes with customers, urrging involved local charities and community groups to keep up the good work of grocery distribution.

The Kingsteignton venue belongs to the supermarket chain’s Community Food Connection scheme which is run in conjunction with leading food charity FareShare.

The Community Food Connection scheme ensures that Tesco is able to donate surplus food at the end of the day to charities and community groups.

It uses an innovative app, developed by social enterprise FoodCloud, to notify groups each night about the food available for collection.

More than 7,000 groups across the UK are able to pick up free food from their local Tesco store. Since the scheme began, the supermarket giant has donated more than 36 million meals with more than one million meals a month being donated.

So far the Kingsteignton store has donated 23,058 meals.

Alec Brown, head of community at Tesco, said: ‘We firmly believe that no good food should go to waste.

‘That is why we set up our Community Food Connection scheme which ensures that our surplus food is put to good use in the local community.

‘We ae celebrating four years of the scheme with our colleagues and customers, and we hope this will encourage more groups to sign up so that even more surplus food benefits local groups.’

FareShare chief executive, Lindsay Boswell, said: ‘The food that Tesco donates makes a really big difference to local charities and communities across the UK.

‘We are proud to have been able to work with the company over the past four years to create this pioneering scheme, which is the biggest of its kind in the UK.’

She added: ‘We hope that by celebrating this milestone with Tesco colleagues and customers, we can reach out to even more charities and community groups so that they can receive the free surplus food that it is able to offer.’