Moscow, 20 May 2019 – X5 Retail Group N.V. ("X5" or the "Company"), a leading Russian food retailer (LSE and MOEX ticker: "FIVE"), and the Foodbankrus announce the results of this year’s second citywide Basket of Kindness food drive. Held on 18 May across 231 Perekrestok and Karusel stores in Moscow, the event collected 20 tonnes of food and hair care products to fill over 3,000 baskets.
The event was organised and run with the involvement of some 500 volunteers of the Foodbankrus and approximately 200 employees of the X5 formats, who have already started to distribute the food to seniors in need across the Tver, Vladimir, Kaluga, Bryansk, Tula, Orel, Voronezh, and Moscow regions.
X5 Retail Group provided infrastructural support for the food drive. Its retail chains also supplied an additional 2.5 tonnes of missing items to equalise the "baskets of kindness". The food drive in Russia’s capital city was held with the support of the Moscow City Government. Schwarzkopf & Henkel, RosLogistics, and the Orthodox Volunteers Movement also supported the event.
In 2018, X5 and the Foodbankrus decided to run the Basket of Kindness project in the form of citywide food drives. Such food drives have been held in Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Samara, and Moscow, together with an online food drive in Nizhny Novgorod. The Basket of Kindness encompassed some 1,000 stores across X5 Retail Group’s network to provide 10,000 families in need with 100 tonnes of food. Over 2,000 volunteers were involved last year. Rostov-on-Don inaugurated the series of food drives in 2019. On 2 March, people of the city contributed 5 tonnes of food to fill over 1,000 food baskets.