Operating Review
Making a positive difference to our community
Our stores are at the heart of the communities they serve and last year we invested £18 million in community initiatives, and a further £12 million from charity fundraising and donations in our stores. Our activities focus on areas that matter most to our colleagues and customers such as food, family, health and children.
Scouts and Girl Guides join the Active Kids scheme Our Active Kids programme is a great example of this and 38,000 registrations have been received for the 2007 scheme. For the first time this year the nation’s one million Scouts and Girl Guides are eligible to join. Customers earn Active Kids vouchers against spend in-store and online which can then be redeemed by schools against activity and cookery equipment. Since the launch of Active Kids in 2005 we have donated £34 million of sports equipment, kit and coaching to over 26,000 UK schools and nurseries. Active Kids also aims to encourage healthy eating as customers earn a bonus voucher for buying fresh fruit, vegetables and salad, plus any of the 2,350 foods marked with the healthy ‘apple stamp’, such as milk, pasta, rice and fresh fish.
We also work with the Youth Sports Trust and English Schools Athletics Association as part of our commitment to support grass roots activities rather than national sporting teams or events. All the profit from our bags for life, £159,000 in 2006/07, goes directly into local community projects recommended by our store colleagues as part of our community grants programme.
Another great example of a scheme that supports our business, the community and the environment is our food donation scheme. This reduces the amount of surplus food past its sell-by date but not its use-by date we have to send to landfill. Instead we distribute this to charities across the country such as the Salvation Army and FareShare. In the year ending March 2007 we donated £3.4 million of food to homeless charities and 60 per cent of our stores are linked to local charities through the scheme. Our aim is to increase this to 100 per cent and we remain the only UK supermarket to donate food in this way all year round rather than just at peak trading periods.
Community involvement also goes beyond our stores such as our sponsorship of Comic Relief and Sport Relief. This year we raised over £7 million for Comic Relief through sales of Comic Relief merchandise and colleague activity. This represented 22 per cent of the total £32 million raised on the night.
