The Iceland retail chain has extended its giveaway of frozen vegetables to customers using Healthy Start Vouchers in retail stores across England, Wales and Northern Ireland until the end of August 2021. The free veg, worth £1 for every Healthy Start voucher used in store, will boost the value of the vouchers ensuring families have easy access to nutritious food right up until the end of the summer holiday period.
In Scotland, families will receive the same offer of free frozen vegetables each time they spend £4.25 or more on a Best Start Foods card.
Marcus Rashford MBE stated: “Long-term change comes from collaboration and every single one of us stepping up to play a role, big or small. I’m proud of what the Taskforce has achieved in this space collectively and I’m thrilled to see Iceland continue such a vital commitment to the cause with the extension of the Healthy Start voucher top up.”
Frozen vegetables offer the nutritional value of fresh veg, but also reduces waste and lasts longer, helping families manage their budgets while ensuring they have healthy food on hand.
Iceland will report its findings and learnings back to the Food Foundation, which is working to support the implementation of the UK’s National Food Strategy recommendations. It will be feeding this information back to the government to inform those engaged in the future design of the scheme. The chain’s management hopes this will help to make a case for extending entitlement to the Voucher to more families.
Henry Dimbleby, independent lead of the National Food Strategy, remarked: “It is fantastic to see Iceland extending its support for Healthy Start. The evidence shows that supporting families with free fruit and veg can meaningfully improve the diets of children when money is tight at home.”
Richard Walker, managing director of Iceland Foods, said: “As a proud member of Marcus Rashford’s Child Food Poverty Taskforce, we are working with the Food Foundation and the Government to further support families by raising awareness of the Healthy Start and Best Start Foods schemes in our stores. We understand the continued pressing need to help from our interactions with millions of customers each week. Iceland has a long history of supporting our local communities and offering great quality, low cost food to help families across the country. We will continue to review our commitment to ensure we are able to support Marcus’ campaign to the fullest possible extent.”
Customers can choose from 25 varieties of frozen vegetables and can redeem the offer every time they use a Healthy Start Voucher or each time they spend at least £4.25 on a Best Start Foods card in store.
Iceland has a dedicated webpage supporting the scheme and is promoting the offer instore and online in a variety of ways. This includes a social media campaign supported by Marcus Rashford, newsletter updates to all Bonus Card customers and community level support via downloadable posters and leaflets for relevant groups. Within stores there will be dedicated point of sale information on the frozen vegetable cabinets to signpost to the free £1 veg initiative as well as door stickers, digital window posters and word of mouth promotion from instore colleagues.
