Bridging the gap between food banks and supermarkets, Community Grocery stores help keep families fed by providing access to affordable food and wrap-around support to those who need it. If you are feeling the financial impact of the rising cost of living, and it’s hard to put food on the table, then we’re here to help through our network of stores.
Step inside a Community Grocery and you’ll find a full range of food, household, and toiletry options available for you to choose from at the fraction of the cost of your weekly shop. Anyone who is finding it hard to feed their families and could do with our help can sign up to be a member.
But the Community Groceries are not just about food. In each store you’ll find a range of free wrap-around support on offer for members, like mental health courses, money management support, healthy cooking classes, job clubs and much more. The Community Grocery is being run by the national award-winning charity, The Message Trust in partnership with local churches.
Access support
Save money
Reduce wasteThanks to our work rescuing and distributing surplus food, by shopping with us you also get to play your part in protecting the environment and saving thousands of tonnes of food being wasted each year.
Our Impact To Date
Over 65,000
member families kept fed
16 million
meals provided to families battling food poverty
5,100 tonnes
of food saved from waste
850,000
shopping trips done in our stores
(From Sep 2020 to Oct 2024)
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 £1 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.
Support courses are put on in store that members can sign up to for free as part of their annual membership.
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. 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.
