Jamie Oliver makes surprise visit to community cooks at Tesco Community Cookery School

3 February 2020

School has now trained 1,000 community cooks across the country

Jamie Oliver made a surprise visit this week to a class of community cooks learning how best to use surplus food donations to create tasty, nutritious dishes.

His visit was to celebrate 1,000 cooks passing through the Tesco Community Cookery School programme which he launched with Tesco a year ago.  The community cooks learn everything from knife skills and nutrition to recipes for versatile base sauces, which can be adapted to complement a wide variety of donated food.

Jamie, who helped to devise the recipes, spent time with the cooks talking about the work they do in their communities and how the surplus food they receive gets put to good use.

The Tesco Community Cookery School was developed in partnership with food redistribution charity FareShare, and builds on Tesco’s Community Food Connection scheme which supplies a million meals each month to 7,000 charities and community groups across the UK.

Tesco has been focusing on reducing food waste for over a decade. In 2009, Tesco stopped sending food to landfill and in 2013, became the first retailer to publish its food waste data. In 2016, Tesco made a commitment that no food safe for human consumption will go to waste in its operations.

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