Millions of families are facing not knowing where the next meal is coming from, so the Community Grocery is here to help.
Step inside a grocery and you’ll find a range of food options fresh from local supermarkets, meaning our members can come and shop for their whole family at the fraction of the cost of a supermarket. Whilst also saving thousands of tonnes of food being wasted each year.
But it’s not just about the food. In each store you’ll also find a range of free support on offer to members. Support like job clubs, money management support, healthy cooking classes, exploring Christianity courses and much more.
The Community Grocery is being run by the national award-winning charity, The Message Trust in partnership with local churches.
How It Started
Covid-19 and the cost of living crisis has changed all of our lives, but throughout this we’ve wanted to do our bit to help our neighbours.
During the first Covid lockdown in 2020 we delivered 60,000 meals and food parcels to homes and families across Wythenshawe who would have struggled to put food on the table without a bit of extra help.
But as that lockdown lifted the need wasn’t going away, in fact it was getting worse and we couldn’t stand by and do nothing. So, the idea of a Community Grocery was born.
Today, we have stores here in Sharston (near Wythenshawe) and across the UK with our shelves packed full of the quality food that we’ve sourced through our surplus suppliers, ready to help feed families for less and support them along the way.
Our Impact To Date
Over 43,000+
member families kept fed
13.6 million
meals provided to families battling food poverty
5,250 tonnes
of food saved from waste
525,000
shopping trips done in our stores
(As at May 2023)
Want to know more about how we’re keeping families fed? You can read a copy of our full impact report online now.
How It Works
You sign up for £5 to become an annual member of the Community Grocery, giving you access to multiple food shops each week.
Suppliers provide the Community Grocery with redistributed surplus food, including fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as packaged and canned goods.
Members can come and shop for their whole family at the grocery giving them access to food for less and helping us all reduce food waste.
Where Our Food Comes From
Lots of the items we source are classed as surplus and have been rescued from supermarkets and food suppliers before being redistributed to our groceries. If we’d not done this the food would have normally ended up going into landfill, even though it’s perfectly safe and fine to eat!
There are many reasons why food finds its way to the groceries. Common reasons are that there are packaging mistakes, supermarkets have made errors with ordering, or that the food that ends up too close to or just past its ‘best before’ date for them to sell. As a result, some of the items in the grocery have recently past their best before dates but are still perfectly safe to eat and often taste just as good! All our ‘past best before’ products are regularly checked for quality and we’ll never stock anything that’s past it’s ‘use by’ date.
You can find out more the difference between best before and use by dates here.
As we are reliant on distributing whatever surplus food becomes available each week, we can’t guarantee what items we’ll have in stock for you on each visit, so you may find that you need to top up your shop from our little extras section. Our little extras will contain items that we haven’t been able to source through our surplus links and so purchase these direct from wholesalers in bulk passing on as much of the savings as we can. We receive new deliveries every few days and you can be the first to see what goodies we have in stock for you by following your local Community Grocery Facebook or Instagram pages.