OUR
COMMUNITIES
As part of our endeavour
to be the best store in every community we serve, we need to focus on more than just offering the Best in Fresh and an amazing shopping experience. We believe that being the best store in the community means being involved with the communities that we serve by helping them thrive. We do this through our CSI initiatives and through our local supplier development programme.
Food Lover’s Market is part of an ecosystem that works to support our wider communities. As a food retailer, we focus specifically on improving foodsecurity in impoverished communities and supporting child and community-centric organisations that work with children from disadvantaged communities to bring about social change and life skills education.
Partnership
Food Lover’s Market has been partnering with FoodForward SA since they opened their doors in 2009 to address widespread hunger in South Africa. FoodForward SA connects a world of excess to a world of need by recovering quality edible surplus food from the consumer goods supply chain and distributing it to community organisations that serve the vulnerable. Each month, Food Lover’s Market donates fresh fruit and veggies through our Freshpak distribution centre that is then distributed to their beneficiaries; and every year, all proceeds from our World Hunger Month campaigns are donated to FoodForward SA. Last year alone, that equated to the equivalent of more than 3.5 million meals.
SPORTING CHANCE
Partnership
This year marks 10 years of partnership with Sporting Chance, a child and community-centric organisation that organises a variety of sporting programmes and events to bring social change and life skills education in disadvantaged communities.
Food Lover’s Market provides all the food and beverages for the youth attending these initiatives, some of which include the annual Calypso Cricket festival, Street Sports, and Disney Healthy Happy Play. Each year, we donate R100,000 to the organisation so that they can continue to run their sports clinics throughout the year.
WORLD HUNGER MONTH CAMPAIGN
Initiative
We use the power of our business to support the eradication of hunger. Since 2017, Food Lover’s Market has run an annual month-long in-store World Hunger Month campaign in partnership with FoodForward SA to raise awareness and funds for meals for the hungry by encouraging customers to purchase select partner products. This initiative has raised more than 9 million meals since the inception of this campaign.
The Power of our stores
Our focus is to build store-led relationships
with local child-centric organisations that empower our colleagues and change the lives of beneficiaries. In this way, each Food Lover’s Market store supports a child-centric Beneficiary Organisation (BO) in their immediate community through feeding schemes and donations. We support a minimum of 52 beneficiaries on an ongoing basis. There are 17 in the Western Cape, 6 in the Eastern Cape, 9 in KZN, 26 Inland and 11 through Head Office. We also support 150 schools, churches and sports clubs on once-off basis throughout the year.
