How the food & drink sector is tackling holiday hunger

Skipping meals. Cutting back on household essentials. Taking out loans. These are just some of the ways UK families plan to deal with increased food bills during the school holidays.

New research from Iceland has laid bare the struggles parents face over the summer, when 85% report bigger food bills. More than a quarter (26%) will resort to buy now, pay later (BNPL) services, while a similar proportion (24%) will consider skipping meals, found its survey of 2,000 people in July. The pressure to spend more on food and other items means 28% of parents are “dreading” the summer break.

To compound their misery, IGD’s latest report warns retail food inflation is set to peak at 5.1% in late summer 2025, significantly outpacing general inflation.

Against that backdrop, Iceland and many others in the food industry are  looking to help combat holiday hunger. So, who’s doing what? How have approaches evolved? What’s the impact – on hunger and on business? And what wider action is needed to stop fmcg companies having to step in and feed struggling families at this time?

At last month’s Grocer Gold Awards, Iceland won the new Social Impact Initiative of the Year category for its Iceland Food Club. The interest-free microloan initiative is designed to offer a better alternative to BNPL services, payday loan companies and other unscrupulous operators that often exacerbate the spiral of debt.

Launched in 2020, the scheme allows anyone to apply to borrow up to £100 during the school holidays – repaid at a manageable £10 per week. Iceland expanded the scheme in 2024 on the back of an independent social impact report, which revealed 74% of users moved away from high-cost credit, while every £1 invested in the initiative generated £58 in social value.

In addition, the supermarket is giving customers a £5 top-up to free school meal vouchers this summer. That’s described as its “biggest-ever free school meal top-up – more than double the £2 offered in 2023”.

“We know how tough things are for families right now, which is why Iceland is once again offering a helping hand through our Food Club,” says Richard Walker, executive chairman of Iceland Foods. “Repayments are kept manageable, helping families to spread the cost of essentials without falling into a cycle of debt.”

Iceland is far from the only retailer making efforts on this front. From Aldi donating more than a million meals to those in need, to Morrisons’ Kids Eat Free offer across its 344 cafés nationwide, every major supermarket is stepping up to the plate in one way or another.

“From education programmes and community partnerships to meal support, these initiatives are helping more children access healthier food and lifestyles,” says Olivia Bubb, senior consultant at IGD. “These efforts are making a real impact and are increasingly embedded in corporate strategies.”

Suppliers big and small are also doing their bit to tackle hunger. Another Grocer Gold winner for its efforts on food poverty is Little Dish. It won the accolade for its Buy One, Give One programme, which involves donating one meal to a child in need for every meal bought. This summer, it will also donate 10,000 meals to The Felix Project to be redistributed to children in need.

Kellogg’s, meanwhile, has been supporting school breakfast clubs in the UK’s most deprived areas for the past 27 years. It’s done that via cash grants, retailer partnerships and support for the Magic Breakfast charity.  Parent company Kellanova describes school breakfast clubs as  “a lifeline” for families, but acknowledges “a huge gap when schools break up for the holidays”.

As such, for the past three years, Kellogg’s has partnered with Morrisons to offer free ‘Kellogg’s Breakfasts’ over that period. A bowl of cereal and a piece of fruit is available to adults or children at all the retailers’ cafés.

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All in all, it amounts to what Mark Game, founder of food redistribution charity The Bread & butter Thing, describes as “increased activity” from the industry this year. “supermarkets and food businesses are continuing or relaunching free meal offers during the holidays. Meanwhile, more suppliers are coming on board with redistribution – including growers and processors, who now view partnerships like ours as a meaningful part of their ESG commitments.”

Decades of support

Support for families going hungry is nothing new in itself. “Supermarkets and food companies have been involved in food redistribution for decades,” says Steve Butterworth, CEO of Neighbourly, a platform that matches businesses with local good causes.

“Structured partnerships began to take shape in the mid-1990s, and by the early 2000s, surplus redistribution had become an organised effort across multiple retailers and manufacturers. ”

Waitrose has been supporting local communities “for decades”, points out Simon Winch, ethics, sustainability & environment lead at the John Lewis Partnership.

Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s has a 26-year partnership with Comic Relief, which included the launch of its Nourish the Nation scheme in 2022. There’s also Kellogg’s aforementioned 27-year support of breakfast clubs, while in wholesale, Brakes has led the way for a decade.

Meals & More, the Brakes-founded charity enabling children living in poverty to access food and activities, celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. “When it started back in 2015, few people outside of academia and charities had heard of holiday hunger, let alone the debilitating impact it has on millions of children every year,” says operations director Peter McGrath.

“Meals & More has grown from supporting four clubs in 2015 to now partnering with more than 60 UK charities and 390 clubs – with more being added in 2026.”

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Walker is also keen to highlight the long-standing nature of Iceland’s efforts. “‘Doing it Right’ has long been a core principle that guides everything we do. We launched our Iceland Food Club in 2020 and have continued to expand it. Beyond this, in 2023, we stepped up to help families with the cost of infant formula, cutting prices and campaigning for changes to allow discounts and the use of loyalty points to purchase the product.”

But there’s no doubt these efforts have stepped up in the wake of the cost of living crisis. ‘Kids eat free’ campaigns – frequently found in supermarket cafés and chains such as Frankie & Benny’s, Yo Sushi, Subway and more –  are a relatively recent development, according to Game.

What is the impact on hunger?

When it comes to the impact today, industry initiatives boast some serious numbers. Since the launch of Nourish the Nation in 2022, Sainsbury’s has donated 47 million meals and raised over £21m to fight food poverty. Kellogg’s has invested £6m into school breakfast clubs and supported more than 3,000 schools.

Meanwhile, a 2024 report by the Centre for Responsible Finance found the Iceland Food Club had helped customers save £2m by avoiding high-interest credit, cut food bank usage by 77%, and reduced borrowing from illegal lenders by 74%.

For retailers and brands alike, the positives are far-reaching. “Aside from our core aim of helping families, supporting people through initiatives like our Food Club makes good business sense,” says Walker. “We’re not only helping ease immediate financial pressure but also building loyalty and trust for the long term. We’re playing our part in sustaining local communities and high streets, which benefits everyone.”

Little Dish founder Hillary Graves has also seen additional benefits. “It motivates the team, as everyone feels part of an inspiring initiative that improves people’s lives,” she says. “The partnership also enables Little Dish to deepen relationships with retailers by bringing them a campaign that engages shoppers and supports retailers’ CSR goals.”

Scratch beneath the surface, though, and there are question marks over the long-term impact of holiday hunger interventions. While he’s quick to praise industry efforts, Game says the overall impact is “still patchy and often short-term”.

“These are mostly temporary responses to permanent problems,” he argues. “The underlying issue – that healthy food is unaffordable for millions – remains.”

By no means does he lay the blame at the industry’s door, though. “What’s missing is a government-led strategy that supports redistribution infrastructure and subsidises healthier food at source,” he says.

A similar point is made by Neighbourly’s Butterworth. He is pleased to see retailers and suppliers tackling food waste and insecurity as a year-round issue. “Surplus redistribution is no longer an afterthought, it’s becoming embedded across the supply chain,” he says.

There’s a note of caution, though: “That’s vital for reducing environmental impact, but it cannot and must not be the answer to food insecurity.”

A positive step, according to The Trussell Trust, would be for the government to abolish the two-child benefit cap and introduce an “essentials guarantee” into Universal Credit, whose “basic rate is failing in its duty to protect people from hunger and hardship”.

As ever with such intricate issues, genuine answers most likely lie with government. Health and social care secretary Wes Streeting has praised “our brilliant supermarkets” for doing “so much work for our communities”. But, as Butterworth points out: “In an ideal world, food aid wouldn’t be necessary. To get there, we need stronger social safety nets, fairer wages, and government-backed programmes that prevent people from falling into food insecurity in the first place.”

“Ultimately, food and drink companies shouldn’t be filling the gap left by broken policy,” adds Game. “To make their role obsolete, we need a national food strategy that prioritises affordability and nutrition, not just supply chain resilience, subsidies and tax relief that bring down the cost of healthy food in deprived areas, and automatic enrolment into benefits like Healthy Start and free school meals. Feeding your family shouldn’t be a privilege. It should be a baseline.”