Moscow, 02 December 2019 – X5 Retail Group ("X5" or the "Company"), a leading Russian food retailer (LSE and MOEX ticker: "FIVE"), and Foodbankrus announce the results of the Basket of Kindness food drive held in Moscow for the fifth time this year to help collect food aid for vulnerable seniors. Approximately 900 Pyaterochka stores across the Russian capital took part in Basket of Kindness on 30 November, collecting some 43 tonnes of food aid to prepare 7,150 parcels of food and home care products for elderly people in need.
More than 800 volunteers from Foodbankrus lent a hand in collecting and packaging the donations. Parcels are already being distributed to lonely and low-income seniors from 12 Russian regions including the Moscow, Vladimir, Kaluga, Bryansk, Tver, Tula, Orel, Voronezh, Smolensk, Yaroslavl, Ryazan and Lipetsk Regions.
X5 Retail Group undertook to pay all organisational costs, including infrastructure, logistics and other expenses associated with the food drive. The Company added some missing items to the parcels to equalise the food baskets.
In 2019, similar food drives were held offline in Rostov-on-Don, Moscow and Novosibirsk and online at корзинадоброты.рф (providing aid to lonely seniors from rural areas of the Samara Region). Five citywide drives helped collect approximately 80 tonnes of food aid, a nearly 25% increase on the 65 tonnes collected by five food drives held in 2018. This year’s donations were enough to prepare over 13,000 food parcels.
Last year was the first time X5 Retail Group and Foodbankrus used the format of citywide food drives as the main format for their food aid collection efforts under the Basket of Kindness initiative. Nearly all X5 stores located in the five designated cities (Kazan, Yekaterinburg, Samara, Nizhny Novgorod and Moscow) volunteered to take part in the charitable events.