With so many traditional approaches to fundraising unavailable to us this year due to the pandemic, our charity champions have had to work especially hard to support this new partnership and motivate colleagues to fundraise in innovative ways. That’s why we’re incredibly proud to have raised a fantastic £70,000 to support Together for Short Lives during these uncertain times, which can fund over 800 community care sessions for children, giving families precious moments together and allowing parents the rare opportunity to just be mum and dad.

Our dedicated charity champions achieved this through a myriad of new fundraising initiatives including virtual quizzes, step challenges, online raffles and plant growing competitions. In addition, the business took the decision to donate £1,000 to each of the 15 Children’s Hospices our sites are partnered with, committed to match-fund key fundraising drives, and donated £1 to the partnership for every colleague survey Completed.

"We have been blown away by the energy and enthusiasm shown by all Premier Foods staff to get behind our partnership and make a difference to the lives of seriously ill children and their families across the UK. We are so grateful for every employee that has contributed to the extraordinary fundraising that has taken place across this challenging year, as well as the kind delivery of vital food packages during the pandemic to our hospices. Thank you so much. Your support means that we can be there for seriously ill children and their families, so that they can make the most of every moment together.”

Lucy Crisp
Head of Corporate Partnerships, Together for Short Lives

Our longstanding partnership with industry charity GroceryAid has proved more important than ever this year: with a 12% increase in colleagues helped, the charity is working hard to provide additional emotional, practical and financial support to industry colleagues in light of the pandemic. We continue to have colleague representation on both its President and Southern Network Committees, providing a great platform from which we can effectively drive awareness of the charity and support services it offers among our own colleagues, and fundraise on its behalf. For example, this year our charity champions organised several virtual fundraising events focused around health and well-being, including Yoga, Pilates and HIIT classes, plus a 5K running challenge. In recognition of our continued momentum in supporting GroceryAid, we are proud to have been awarded top, gold level supporter status for the third year running.

One of our three guiding principles during the pandemic was to play our part in providing food to the nation, including those most vulnerable, during this time of difficulty.

• We participated in the Government’s vulnerable food parcels scheme.
• We supported 28 hospitals local to our sites by providing more than 200,000 easy to prepare meals and snacks for our incredible NHS workers, with our colleagues at Nissin kindly offering 30,000 pots of noodles.
• We’ve strengthened our partnership with FareShare, donating the equivalent of 550,000 meals to their network of food banks around the country.

In addition, our amazing colleagues up and down the country came up with great ideas to support their local communities including creating PPE and visors for their local NHS, sourcing out of stock items to make sure those relying on them would not go without, or hand sewing protective masks and tote bags for local nurses. Well done all!