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With one in four Londoners facing food insecurity due to the cost of living crisis, City Harvest is seeing an increased demand from people who have never needed food banks previously. The partnership will provide around 200,000 meals and save 330 tonnes of carbon annually.

Cyril Jackson Primary School in Tower Hamlets are one of the beneficiaries. Headteacher Hodo Dirir said: “You’ve got kids coming in, they’ve not had breakfast. They are starving. How do we expect them to learn? We have to feed them.”

The new partnership will see City Harvest collect from Fresh Direct and Wild Harvest’s Dagenham depot twice a week, in addition to weekly collections from Brakes’ site in Park Royal, helping charities including Shepherd’s Bush Families Project and The Soup Kitchen London.

Emily Pinkney, sustainability manager at Sysco GB, added: “It’s fantastic to work with an organisation like City Harvest to ensure surplus food goes to support people who really need it.

“Our goal is to minimise food waste through every stage of our operations, but sometimes it’s unavoidable, and this partnership will help ensure that it’s not wasted. Working with City Harvest is so easy, we recommend them to other companies as a sustainable solution to surplus food.”

The Fresh Direct team will also spend time volunteering at the City Harvest depot to ensure that they understand the demands on the charity and the value it is adding to local communities, fostering even closer links between the two organisations.