Iceland celebrates 50 years of giving

Supporting good causes has been part of Iceland’s family ethos since the business was founded in 1970 – and it is a commitment and passion fully shared by the business’s 28,000 colleagues, as well as its five million customers and hundreds of suppliers.

The latest 2020 impact report issued by the Iceland Foods Charitable Foundation (IFCF) documents £30 million of giving since 2005, focused principally on dementia research, other medical charities, and the environment. Wherever possible, the foundation aims to target its support on smaller and less well-funded charities, where it feels that it can make a real difference to their work and so to people’s lives.

In the last decade IFCF has given £17 million to dementia charities, including a £10 million contribution to help fund the London hub of the new UK Dementia Research Institute at UCL in the hope that this will bring society much closer to finding a treatment, preventive or cure or this devastating condition. It has also given substantial funding to Alzheimer’s Research UK, the Alzheimer’s Society and Alzheimer Scotland, and trained all Iceland’s 28,000 colleagues to be Dementia Friends.

Donations of over £300,000 to the UK Sepsis Trust have provided funding for a nationwide Schools Against Sepsis campaign, to raise awareness of the symptoms of this common and deadly condition, which was also highlighted on Iceland milk bottles.

Other medical charities to benefit from our support include Prostate Cancer UK, to which IFCF has donated £1 million since 2008; the British Lung Foundation, to which it donated £100,000 in 2019 to fund research into idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis; Alder Hey Children’s Charity; and Vision4Children.

To provide help to those most in need during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, IFCF made substantial donations to Age UK, St John’s Ambulance, and NHS Charities Together.

Since 2010 the Foundation has supported veterans of our armed forces with donations of £1.5 million to Help For Heroes; £1 million to The Royal British Legion; and £1 million towards the construction of the UK’s new Defence & National Rehabilitation Centre.

A more recent focus on environmental causes has included foundation funding for the development of the Backyard Nature campaign to reconnect children with the natural world on their doorsteps, and funding for Surfers Against Sewage’s Big Spring Beach Clean: Summit to Sea and the UK’s first ever Plastic Free Awards. IFCF has also worked with Eden Reforestation to plant one million mangrove trees in Indonesia: improving coastal protection, helping local people, and benefiting the wider global environment by sequestering carbon.

In addition to its financial donations, Iceland has helped numerous good causes through gifts in kind, ranging from the donation of freezers to food banks to the provision of Christmas dinners for Community Shops in deprived communities across the UK.

You can read the full IFCF impact report here.