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Morrisons donates gardening tools to kids

Words by Smiley Team

Morrisons has launched ‘It’s Good To Grow’, a campaign in all its stores that will donate gardening equipment to schoolchildren across the UK in the hope of educating kids about where their food comes from.

The scheme will see customers gain one ‘It’s Good to Grow’ token in their My Morrisons account via the app and website for every £10 spent in store or online, which can then be donated to any school to redeem equipment such as gardening tools, composting bins and seeds to get growing. 

The National Food Strategy, published earlier this year, outlined the need for the UK to improve dietary health whilst protecting the environment, warning that a failure to do so could lead to obesity costing the NHS £15 billion by 2035.

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Morrisons hopes the initiative will help build a connection between kids and healthy food by making school children more aware of the journey of food from field to fork.

New research by YouGov on behalf of Morrisons has found that some children aged six to 15 do not have a good understanding of how fruits and vegetables are grown. For example, only 34% correctly identified how asparagus is grown, with 32% stating that asparagus is grown underground and 21% saying they don’t know how it is grown. 

Giving children the tools and knowledge needed can help develop better dietary habits – with research finding that out of 1,115 children surveyed aged six to 15, 70% are more likely to eat produce that they have grown and cared for themselves.

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Rachel Eyre, chief customer and marketing officer at Morrisons, said: “We’re really proud of the work that we do for British food and with British farmers. It's great to be able to launch a campaign that will give our youngest customers the knowledge and equipment to gain a better understanding about where food comes from and how to grow it.

"We want children to engage with nature as it will help them to start eating more healthily now and in the future, because they are more likely to eat fruit and vegetables when they understand them or have grown them themselves.”

This is the latest initiative introduced by Morrisons that aims to encourage a sustainable future and follows wider business commitments such as pledging to be completely supplied by net zero emission British farms by 2030 and committing to the Peas Please initiative, run by the Food Foundation, to encourage customers to eat more vegetables.

For more information visit: https://www.itsgoodtogrow.co.uk.

This article aligns with the following UN SDGs

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