As part of FoodForward SA’s five-year scaling plan to reach 1 million people daily, we have successfully opened up our newest branch in Bloemfontein, Free State. Up until September 2021, our food heroes from our Durban branch have been doing monthly inter-branch transfers of nutritious food provisions to our beneficiary organisations (BOs) located in Bloemfontein, Harrismith and Welkom in the Free State.
With the opening of the new branch, these BOs will now be served by our Free State branch, with the distally-located Harrismith and Welkom BOs being served through our mobile rural depot (MRD) programme. This means that on a monthly basis, our 8-ton refrigerated truck will make its way to these BOs instead of them needing to travel long distances to fetch their food provisions from our Bloemfontein warehouse.
The new FFSA branch in Bloemfontein currently reaches just over 25,000 beneficiaries, through a network of 25 BOs. This number will rise steeply in the coming months.
FoodForward SA has been on a rapid expansion programme which is seeing our impact deepening across all nine provinces as we pursue addressing food insecurity at scale. This expansion programme brings the number of FFSA branches to seven, while we will continue to service the Mpumalanga and Northern Cape Provinces via our Johannesburg branch until the beginning of 2022.