Moscow, 8 February 2018 – X5 Retail Group N.V. (“X5” or the “Company”), a leading Russian food retailer (LSE and MOEX ticker: “FIVE”), and Rus Food Foundation, the first Russian food bank, announce their transition to a new format for collecting food aid. In 2018, the partners plan to organise city-wide food marathons in Moscow, Yekaterinburg, Nizhny Novgorod, Kazan and Novosibirsk. The first marathon will take place in Kazan on 3 March 2018, with the Foundation’s volunteers collecting food aid for socially vulnerable senior citizens of the Republic of Tatarstan at all of Kazan’s Pyaterochka, Perekrestok and Karusel stores.
This approach is a scaled-up version of the food drive technique employed in the Basket of Kindness campaign. It will help to increase audience engagement and enable the organisers to gather more food. In 2017, X5 Retail Group and Rus Food Foundation staged Basket of Kindness events at 803 Pyaterochka, Perekrestok and Karusel stores, with customers buying and donating some 80 tons of non-perishable foods. The aid was provided to 6,000 low-income families and senior citizens from various Russian regions.
Food for the Villages, the first city-wide food marathon, took place on 2 December 2017 at 200 of Moscow’s Perekrestok supermarkets, as well as at some Dixy and Billa stores. Customers donated over 30 tons of food, which translated into gift sets for approximately 15,000 senior citizens in nine regions. The Moscow food marathon showed the effectiveness of city-wide actions, and this was chosen as the key format for the Basket of Kindness project.
In order to maximise engagement in the food aid drive, in 2018, X5 and Rus Food Foundation will continue promoting their online charity food store at корзинадоброты.рф. This website was launched in late November 2017, and in the first two months it had over 30,000 unique visitors from all over Russia. In addition to providing information about the project’s history and status, the website offers multiple ways to participate in the initiative, starting from submitting a volunteer application to donating food. It also enables visitors to buy a food set online and to donate goods ranging in price from RUB 150 to RUB 2,000. The sets include essentials for a family diet, including cereals, pasta, sunflower oil, canned goods, tea and sweets. In the first two months, the Basket of Kindness online charity store sold over RUB 300,000 worth of food sets. The aid recipients include elderly people living alone, single mothers, large families with extremely low income and orphans.