To leave a measurable positive impact on the communities we serve and source from, and address food poverty by providing good food for all of us .
Food is at the heart of our business, and we strive to make good food joyful, accessible and affordable for everyone, every day. We are committed to providing excellent value for our customers however we know that sadly the reality for many communities is that it is still difficult to access sufficient, healthy food.
Our community and partnerships work aims to address the key drivers of food poverty, which continue to be exacerbated by increasing costs of living. We work with organisations, including Comic Relief, to fund initiatives that ensure communities have improved access to balanced, nutritional and sustainable food sources, now and in the future. By rallying our customers, colleagues and suppliers, we’ve been able to make a huge difference to people who need it most.
Our ambition
Our progress so far
| Baseline | Performance 2023/24 | Performance 2024/25 | Target | |
| Amount generated for good causes (£ million) | N/A | £36.0m | £33.8m | N/A |
| Meals donated (number) | N/A | 14,611,272 | 18,341,490 | N/A |
For further information on our performance, please visit our Reports & Policies page for our Plan for Better report or read our full sustainability results in our Plan for Better Databook.
Our approach
National community impact with Comic Relief
We work with our longstanding charity partner, Comic Relief, to reach as many communities as possible and support people that are experiencing food poverty. In November 2022, we launched Nourish the Nation together, a food-focused programme that aims to tackle food poverty, now and in the future. Every year, we raise donations for the programme through customer campaigns, in store and online, and then use this money to fund organisations that are focused on helping people to become more food secure.
Local community impact driven by our colleagues
In each of our stores we have colleagues who are Community Champions and build relationships in the local community. Their role involves supporting organisations that are working hard to make a positive impact on the community and are supporting communities at risk of food poverty.
Our stores are also pivotal in supporting the co-ordination of our food redistribution programmes with Neighbourly and Olio, which are helping us to both tackle food poverty and reduce food waste.
Our colleagues can also nominate good causes for a Good food for all of us community grant.
Case study
Resolve immediate hunger
We work to provide nutritious food to people in their hardest moments. This aims to help people to cope in the short term and access essential and immediate support, particularly during the winter months.
Over the last three Christmases, through Comic Relief, we have donated a total of £3.5 million to organisations that support people experiencing food poverty, allowing us to help over 1.4 million people with access to food. Organisations we’ve supported include FareShare, Trussell, City Harvest, Felix Project, His Church and Community Shop.
Our Good food for all of us community grants also support local organisations such as food banks by providing funds to top-up stock and ensure that the services can help as many people as possible. Our stores also play a huge part in helping to resolve immediate hunger.
Our customers can donate food products at the front of our stores and our colleagues support by organising the redistribution of any surplus food through our partnerships with Olio and Neighbourly to help as many local communities as possible access food.
Case study
Provide good food for all children
One of our key aims is tackling food poverty for children, now and in the future, so every young person can have a good start in life. Our efforts are focused on supporting school children, both in the holiday’s and during term time.
We have donated over £3.5m to Comic Relief to support with Holiday Activity and food (HAF) programmes, funding organisations who provide free healthy meals and enriching activities for children over the school holidays. This funding has helped to support over 200 local grassroots community organisations across the UK and create over 35,000 additional holiday club places.
With our partner, The Bread and Butter Thing, we have helped to launch school-based food clubs, which run all-year-around and provide long-term solutions to help improve families’ access to fresh and nutritious food.
Many of our stores support children and schools through our Good food for all of us community grants. For example, many have donated healthy food products to help with school breakfast clubs.
Case study
Create more food secure communities
We believe everyone should have access to balanced, nutritional, and sustainable food, but unfortunately that’s not always the reality. Across the UK, food clubs play a critical role in helping to overcome this challenge, working to alleviate food poverty, reduce food waste, and build more resilient communities.
Through our Nourish the Nation programme with Comic Relief, we provide funding to different partners (over £5m to date), who run a variety of food-club models. Food clubs exist to support communities to become more food secure by helping people access affordable, healthy food, usually including fresh fruit and vegetables. They are often considered a more dignified solution to food banks, by giving people choice of a range of products and through paying a small membership fee.
Our investment in food clubs has allowed our partners to grow and expand their networks, helping to open at least 56 new clubs across the UK. It has also made a significant difference to those experiencing food poverty, as 72% of people using the food club services that we help to fund reported that they are skipping meals less frequently.
Our Good food for all of us community grants have also supported local good causes to help communities to become more food secure, for example, through funding cooking workshops or donating kitchen equipment, to help provide people with the skills, knowledge, and confidence to enable food to become a joyful experience.
Working in collaboration
Comic Relief
Comic Relief and Sainsbury’s first started working together in 1999, and in the past 26 years we have raised over £179 million for Comic Relief. In 2022, after 23 years of sponsorship of Red Nose Day with Comic Relief, we launched a completely bespoke and collaborative new programme with the charity, called Nourish the Nation, with the objective to fund initiatives designed to tackle food insecurity and ensure communities have improved access to balanced, nutritional, and sustainable food sources now and in the future. Since launching Nourish the Nation, we have donated over £21 million to help tackle food poverty and donated nearly 31 million meals.
Neighbourly
We started working with Neighbourly in 2021 to help us manage our back of store food donation programme. Neighbourly helps to connect our stores with a vast network of charities, schools and community groups across the UK who come in to collect any surplus food on a daily basis. We also work with Neighbourly on our volunteering programme and grant management.
Olio
In 2024, to build on the success of our food donation programme, we started a new partnership with Olio, the local food sharing app to enable us to start donating ‘use-by’ dated surplus. Similar to Neighbourly, Olio connect our stores with local volunteers, otherwise known as Food Waste Heroes, who come into store each evening to collect surplus food.
FareShare
We have a long history of working with food banks and community donation schemes to support our local communities and we are a founding member of FareShare which began in 1994. Through our Sainsbury’s Grocery Online website, we have helped to raise over £3 million for FareShare since 2021 through customer donations.
Royal British Legion
Alongside our work to tackle food poverty, we’re also proud to have been partners with the Royal British Legion for over 30 years, and in that time, we’ve helped raise over £56 million to support our Armed Forces community. To support Poppy Appeal, every year we welcome volunteers back into our Supermarkets to help with fundraising, we make poppies available across all Sainsbury’s and Argos stores, and we rally customers to donate online through channels.
Case study
Spicing up mealtimes with the Seasonings Shuttle
Research commissioned by Sainsbury's revealed that over half of those who struggle to pay their bills are no longer excited by food or mealtimes, so we launched the Seasonings Shuttle with Comic Relief, offering free herbs and spices to visitors of the mobile food clubs run by our partner The Bread and Butter Thing.
The initiative aimed to tackle meal monotony and ensure that food club users had access to good food, without having to compromise on taste. In May and August, the Seasonings Shuttle visited locations in Manchester and the North East of England, and visitors could choose from a range of dried or fresh ingredients to take home. After the launch in Manchester, 91 per cent of visitors reported the ingredients made their meals more enjoyable.
