Blog

In July and August, the warehouse was full with even more food than usual: bread, potatoes, carrots, milk, eggs, and lots and lots of pasta. The huge walk-in refrigerator was crammed with meat and cheese. Some of this was part of our regular supply of surplus food, but much of it is paid for by the Food Charities Grant Fund, a temporary programme from the Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) to get food to people who are hard-pressed financially during the Covid-19 crisis. Eggcup delivered 29288 kilos of food for this programme in seven weeks – or the [...]

The Covid-19 crisis has brought lots more work to do at Eggcup: new projects, with new deliveries and pick-ups, lots more food to check, weigh, sort and package, more demands for data and reports.  Fortunately it also brought more volunteers. When lockdown began, many people on furlough were looking for satisfying things to do, and many people who would usually volunteers elsewhere found their regular work cancelled.  We got a remarkable range of people coming to Eggcup: a coach driver, a plumber, civil servants, a human relations consultant, students, teachers.  We also got help from members of the Big Kid Circus, [...]

Eggcup was set up to provide surplus food to food clubs in Lancaster and Morecambe. But from the beginning, the aim was to be flexible, to allow it to do whatever was needed. This flexibility has been tested in the Covid-19 outbreak, when food clubs stopped having social meetings, restaurants shut down, and supermarkets were besieged with panic buying, so that for some items they had empty shelves, rather than the usual surplus. I talked to Project Manager David France to catch up with what Eggcup has been doing so far during the crisis. Food clubs are meant to [...]