Year in numbers: 2024–25

Every year we publish our numbers in full, partly because our funders and the council expect it, and partly because we think the people who donate a bag of tins or an hour of their Thursday morning deserve to know exactly where it went. Here's the picture for 2024–25.

12 tonnes of food rescued from supermarkets, wholesalers, a handful of local hotels and restaurants, and one memorable greengrocer's closing-down clearance. That's food that would otherwise have gone to landfill or anaerobic digestion — still perfectly good, just surplus to whatever it was originally destined for.

4,200 hot meals served through the community kitchen, running three sessions a week across the year. That number is up from just under 3,000 the year before, mostly because we added a Tuesday evening sitting after consistently turning people away on Wednesdays.

340 pantry visits a month, on average — with a low of around 260 in the summer and a peak of over 400 in January, which tracks with what you'd expect: energy bills, post-Christmas budgets, and a cold snap that kept the wholesale surplus flowing a bit heavier than usual too.

Roughly 85 volunteers gave time across the year, from the small core group who show up weekly to the much larger number who did a single Christmas collection shift or helped out for a term as part of a school's community placement. Volunteer hours, added up, come to somewhere north of 6,000 — which is the real engine behind every other number on this page.

What the numbers don't show: the person who came in for their first pantry visit in April and is now on the volunteer rota; the wedding-that-wasn't whose leftover cream became eighty bowls of soup; the regulars who've told us the Thursday queue is the only place all week they don't have to explain themselves to anyone.

We're not going to pretend a bigger number is always a better one — more visits can mean more people are struggling, not more people are being helped well. What we're aiming for isn't growth for its own sake. It's making sure that whoever walks through the door on a Thursday morning gets fed, respected, and asked nothing they don't want to answer.

Thank you to everyone — donors, volunteers, funders, and the people who trust us enough to come back — who made this year's numbers what they are.