Anita was in the Tesco Metro store on George Street, Richmond, handing out FareShare 'shopping lists' with suggested donations and encouraging customers to buy items to leave at the in-store food collection boxes.

FareShare is the UK’s biggest charity fighting hunger and food waste. The Food donations (including tea, coffee, tinned food, rice, pasta and baked beans) made during Anita’s shift will be boosted by an additional cash donation to FareShare from Tesco of 20% of their value.

At the start of the shift, Richmond was heaving, with George Street closed to traffic and hundreds of people waiting to meet Santa and Paddington Bear, see the ‘Switching On of the Christmas Lights’ and to watch the Fireworks on the Green. Although most people were in Richmond for the festivities rather than for food shopping, by the end of the shift, the generous donations had filled two collection boxes. And FareShare will also benefit from a generous 20% cash donation from Tesco. Win-Win.

It's a SOUPer day to help”

we said (or may not have - but it adds to the puns and reading experience...) upon arrival to Richmond’s Tesco Metro.

It seemed that they weren’t quite expecting the influx of GoodGymmers ready to help like keen beans, having almost run out of the shopping list flyers and unsure where we should go. Fortun(cookie)ately, GoodGym folk excel at problem solving and strategising, and the “Hounslow clan” created the more practical idea of handing out the shopping lists at the store entrance so that customers could pick up the items and pop them in the baskets post-checkout. (This seems like common sense but the suggested flyering location was not so wise, shall we say).

We divided into teams of shopping list hander-outers and donation collectors, and were given some more freshly printed lists to help us. We activia-ly promoted the collection and were met by varying spectrum of responses and “interesting” reasons to not donate (“none of these items are on my list”) - but enjoyed a chitchat to those that took a keen interest. Of course we milked the opportunity to have our own catch-up amidst the gooddeeding, including the mandatory “has your coach learned your name yet?” update and the GoodGym social later this evening. And Dave didn't fail to disappoint with showing that his "unusual" modelling transfers just as well to indoor tasks (today's features in your top three of creepy Kingston/Richmond photos, but "the one with the boxes" still reigns (chicken)supreme).

You breader believe this”

Having felt that we were having a bad patch of responses to our souper-promoting, we were totally flabbergasted to find Remy and Michelle practically buried behind heaps of donations. Crates upon crates were being filled, it really did take us by surprise to see such generosity after what had felt, at times, like luke-warm responses. Turns out the persistent shopping list giving works in spreading the word.

The 3-4pm team handed over the (carrot)baton to the 4-5pm team of Kate and Rich - and with Kate sporting some very festive Christmas tree earrings, she also took the festive-attire baton on from our Santa hats and reindeer antlers (yes, enthusiastic customers were “rewarded” with the switching-on of the antler lights - unfortunately this is snow joke). Then the baton was passed to team 5-6pm, Africa and Mark A - hopefully you got the festive attire memo! It was great to see how much difference some pears of GoodGym hands had made to collecting more and more donations.

We really decked the halls with our full trolley”

(And we leave you with the carol looping in your head - you’re welcome!)

Brimming with foodbank enthusiasm after the Richmond collection, I returned to Teddington for yesterday's-shift-that-didn't-happen.

The collection had been unmanned for a while so, after donning the fetching red tabard, the first task was filling up a trolley with all of the donations that had been left overflowing on the table, under the table, next to the table... So a bonus free upper body workout before the promoting began.

The Teddington population didn't disappoint again and I barely had to do any active promoting, with customers approaching me to ask what it was all about and what they could buy to help. I don't think I've ever said "perishable" quite as many times in such a short timespan! There was even added encouragement from customers and I left a very full trolley feeling very fulfilled.

We battled the wind and rain to get to Tesco Metro in Teddington tonight. Our job was to meet and greet shoppers and share with them the list of items that they could donate to the FareShare scheme.

Dressed in our antler attire we both provided a very festive welcome and we think the giggles of passing shoppers definitely motivated them to fill 3 large trolleys with donations!! Thank you generous people of Teddington!!

We also managed to recruit a potential runner for GoodGym Wandsworth!! Parallel GoodGym Deeding and Recruiting all in a night’s work! 👏👏