A Burton supermarket giant has helped feed struggling families by giving more than 5,000 meals to charities and community groups.
All Burton's Tesco stores, including the supermarket on St Peter's Bridge, has been helping those in need with its surplus food redistribution scheme, Community Food Connection.
Meals have been donated to homeless shelters, community centres, breakfast clubs and chairities providing food to vulnerable older people.
Alec Brown, Tesco's head of community, said: "We know that Community Food Connection is making a real difference to communities in Burton by providing people in need with meals from food that would otherwise go to waste.
"Now that all of our stores are taking part in Community Food Connection there are more opportunities than ever for groups to benefit from the free food provided under the scheme."
The total has been released to mark the roll-out of the scheme across all of Tesco's stores across the UK to allow them to provide surplus food every night.
To date more than 20 million meals have been provided to charities and community groups taking part in the scheme across the country.
Food for 600,000 meals a week are now being provided to good causes across the UK, saving them money which can be used to provide other services.
The Community Food Connection programme is run in conjunction with FareShare and FoodCloud.
Good causes are able to link up with Tesco stores, from small Express stores to big Tesco Extras, through an innovative app.
The programme allows store teams to alert them to surplus unsold food items available at the end of each day.
Bosses said that not only does the scheme benefit the community groups involved, but it also prevents unsold food going to waste.
Lindsay Boswell, chief executive of FareShare, said: "This is an incredible milestone in store-level food redistribution to charities which Tesco has made possible since developing the programme with FareShare and FoodCloud.
"Tesco has led the way with introducing such a step-change in tackling their store surplus food and having seen the scheme grow and create such impact for vulnerable people, it proves that it can deliver very obvious results which can benefit other retailers and their local communities too."
Mr Brown said: "I would invite any group that thinks they could benefit from the scheme to contact FareShare, as we have the capacity to help even more good causes."
Tesco and FareShare are calling on charities and community groups across Burton to register for the scheme, which sees food including fresh produce such as fruit, vegetables and bakery products, as well as chilled products like meat, cheese and ready meals, donated for free to groups that sign up.
Any organisation that could benefit from the support of Community Food Connection can register at http://fareshare.org.uk/getting-food/fareshare-go-support/
