Omsk, 3August 2020 – X5 Retail Group ("X5" or the "Company"), a leading Russian food retailer (LSE and MOEX ticker: "FIVE") that operates the Pyaterochka, Perekrestok, and Karusel retail chains, together with the Rus Food Foundation launched the third online Basket of Kindness. Basket of Kindness is a charity project to collect food for senior citizens living on their own. The online food drive will run on the initiative’s official website at корзинадоброты.рф until 1 October 2020.
Anyone can donate between RUB 150 and RUB 2,000 via the website to provide food aid, with each sum representing a set selection of products. Once the food drive is over, the food will be divided into sets that provide people with daily basics like cereal grains, pasta, sunflower oil, canned food, tea and confectionery.
X5 Retail Group undertook to pay all organisational costs for the food drive. Pyaterochka will also add some missing items to equalise the food baskets. After the two-month food drive, volunteers will prepare food sets and deliver them to those in need. This time, the Basket of Kindness will help elderly people living alone in small towns and rural areas of the Omsk region.
X5 and the Rus Food Foundation launched the online charity store корзинадоброты.рф in late 2017, with over 156,000 users having visited it since then. The initiative continued into 2018 and 2019, operating as a platform for similar online food drives, having in collected a total of around 3,000 food baskets for seniors living alone in the Nizhny Novgorod and Samara regions.
The Basket of Kindness project was launched in 2015. X5 pioneered the food drive in Russia, creating and continuing to develop a local food aid infrastructure, which enables customers to buy and donate food in-store to help people in need in local communities. Throughout the course of the project, it has attracted some 140,000 donors and collected 545 tonnes of food for around 60,000 families.