One of the quickest and most effective responses by a charity to the coronavirus emergency in the UK came from FareShare, which distributes surplus food to people who need it. Before the pandemic it was handling about 20,000 tonnes of food a year, supplying about 930,000 people a week; by the middle of June 2020 that number had more than trebled to 3.2 million. But it was still not meeting all the demand, which was expected to grow as economic pressures increased in the wake of the crisis. “We’re really terrified about the next couple of years,” says FareShare's chief executive, Lindsay Boswell, a former army officer who also ran the Institute of Fundraising for many years.

FareShare was established in 1993 as a partnership between the homelessness charity Crisis and the supermarket giant Sainsbury’s, but became an independent charity ten years later in order to extend its help beyond homeless people. It now works on two levels: its core business is taking large quantities of surplus food from the industry supply chain, sorting and repacking it and allocating it to member charities that pay a nominal subscription and distribute the food to their beneficiaries. But in 2017 it also launched FareShare Go, in which more than 7,000 local charities collect and distribute surplus food directly from nearby supermarkets at the end of each day: all 3,000-plus Tesco stores and some Waitrose and Asda ones take part.

FareShare Go hit problems in the first coronavirus lockdown, when panic buying cleared many supermarket shelves, leaving nothing spare at the end of the day. But the opposite was the case for the charity's core service as the hospitality industry ground to a halt: food producers and suppliers found themselves with mountains of stock they couldn't sell to restaurants and cafes. Boswell says:

But the boost in supply continued to be outstripped by demand as the number of front-line charities and community groups seeking food from FareShare more than trebled.