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15 August 2018

X5 and Rus Food Foundation to host first Basket of Kindness online food marathon

Moscow, 15 August 2018 – X5 Retail Group ("X5" or the "Company"), a leading Russian food retailer, and Rus Food Foundation are going to host the first online Basket of Kindness, a charity project to collect food for people in need. The marathon will run on the official Basket of Kindness website at корзинадоброты.рф from 15 August to 15 October.

Anyone interested in making a food donation can take part in the online marathon by choosing from baskets of products that range in price from RUB 150 to RUB 2,000. Payments for the baskets can be made online at корзинадоброты.рф. The sets include staple foods such as cereals, pasta, sunflower oil, canned goods, tea and sweets.

X5 Retail Group will add 30% to all online donations. After the two-month marathon, volunteers will sort the food sets and deliver them to those in need. The Baskets of Kindness will go to elderly people living alone in the rural areas of Borsky, Bogorodsky, Balakhninsky, Kstovsky and Dzerzhinsky districts of the Nizhny Novgorod Region.

X5 and Rus Food Foundation launched the online charity store корзинадоброты.рф in late 2017, and over 41,000 people have visited it since November 2017. In the first two weeks after launch, every fifth visitor to the website made a donation. The online platform has helped collect 716 food baskets since its opening, which will also be delivered to pensioners living alone in the Nizhny Novgorod Region. 

The Basket of Kindness project was launched in 2015. Initially, Basket of Kindness collected food donations from only a few stores in each city, which limited the pool of participants to the visitors of these stores. Throughout the course of the project, 77,610 people donated 155 tonnes of food, which was distributed to 15,663 families.  

In 2018, X5 Retail Group and Rus Food Foundation, Russia’s first food bank, switched to a new format of collecting food aid through city-wide food marathons. The first marathon took place on 3 March in 220 stores run by X5 in Kazan, where shoppers bought and donated more than 13 tonnes of food for low-income elderly residents of Tatarstan. On 21 April, Yekaterinburg followed suit, with 160 stores of the local X5 chains collecting 11 tonnes of food for 1,800 elderly people living alone in the Sverdlovsk Region. Next in line to host food marathons are Moscow and Samara.