Sainsbury’s is set to invest over £1.5m in providing children and families across the UK with nutritious food this school year.
Through its partnership with Comic Relief, two charities tackling food insecurity – Magic Breakfast and Rethink Food – will each receive £500,000 from the supermarket to expand their reach, strengthen their impact and help develop long-term solutions to tackling the barriers some families face with accessing nutritious food.
Magic Breakfast will use the investment to provide free, nutritious breakfasts to school children. The funding will reach children most at risk of hunger across both primary and secondary schools.
Rethink Food will use the £500,000 to grow its National School Pantry Network, helping more schools in areas of high deprivation provide free access to nutritious food to take home and wider support for families.
Sainsbury’s has also increased its support for the Department for Education’s free Breakfast Clubs programme so that the 1,400 new schools enrolled onto the programme are eligible to receive a £200 Sainsbury’s gift card to support the scheme. This £280,000 investment brings Sainsbury’s total investment in the programme to more than half a million pounds and means over 2,700 schools will have been supported since launch.
The retailer has allocated another £300,000 from its ‘Good food for all of us’ community grants programme with Neighbourly to upgrading school kitchens in areas of high deprivation across the UK. Examples include equipment upgrades such as ovens, fridges and storage.
“Every child should be able to enjoy nutritious food both throughout the school day and when they get home, but for many families this can be a challenge,” said Sainsbury’s director of sustainability Ruth Cranston.
“Through our partnerships with Comic Relief and the local charities it supports, the Department for Education, and Neighbourly, we’re helping schools provide more support today while also tackling the longer-term barriers that make it hard for some families to access nutritious food.”
It coincides with free school meals being extended to every family on Universal Credit as of 1 September, in a move that will reach over half a million more children and lift 100,000 out of poverty, according to the government.
Later this month, the government is also set to outline final details of updated school food standards. Under current proposals, schools will no longer be able to offer unhealthy ‘grab and go’ options such as sausage rolls and pizza every day, while deep-fried food will be banned completely.
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