The FareShare North East burglary that struck the charity’s Middlesbrough warehouse this week destroyed 16 tonnes of food, the equivalent of 7,000 meals, after thieves cut the power to its walk-in freezers and chiller units and left perishables to spoil.
The break-in happened at the Skippers Lane depot, FareShare North East’s Teesside base, at some point before 07:40 on Tuesday morning, when hub manager Natasha Flanagan arrived and discovered the damage.
What the thieves left behind
Flanagan found lockers and staff drawers ransacked throughout the main warehouse. The chiller doors had been left open and the freezer door had been forced, triggering the spoilage. Pallets of chicken, soup and milk were among the items that had to be thrown out, according to Gazette Live.
‘Lockers were ransacked, the staff drawers in the main warehouse were ransacked, and then I’ve seen the chiller doors were left open and the freezer door which has caused significant damage to food,’ Flanagan said. ‘Honestly it’s heartbreaking and we do really good things here.’
Chief executive Jake Hanmore was direct about the human cost. ‘It stings when you come in and find that the warehouse has been broken into,’ he said. ‘The team that are based here day in and day out are absolutely devastated. We’ve not long moved into this warehouse and so to come in and find it had been broken into was absolutely heartbreaking for them.’
The FareShare North East burglary hits a charity already stretched thin
To understand the scale of what was lost, it helps to look at what FareShare North East does in a full year. According to its unaudited financial statements filed with the Charity Commission for 2023–2024, the organisation redistributed 1,269 tonnes of surplus food to 230 community groups across the region. The 16 tonnes destroyed in a single night represents roughly 1.3% of that annual total: not catastrophic in isolation, but the food was already promised to people who needed it.
The charity collects surplus stock donated by supermarkets and routes it through warehouses in Newcastle and Middlesbrough to more than 200 community groups, including food banks. The Middlesbrough operation has been running since 2023, and moved to its current site only about four months ago. The timing, so soon after a fresh start in a new building, is what seems to have sharpened the sense of grievance for staff.
My read is that the deeper injury here is not financial. Food charities operate on donated stock; they cannot simply reorder. Every pallet of chicken or milk that goes in a skip is a gap that a food bank now has to explain to a family. The perpetrators either did not know that or did not care.
Flanagan put it plainly: ‘We’ve got a really great team of volunteers and staff and we try our best every day to get food out to people that need it.’
Cleveland Police confirmed it received a report of the break-in at around 07:40 BST on Tuesday and said an investigation was ongoing. Anyone with information is asked to get in touch with the force directly.
The Middlesbrough hub is due to reopen on Thursday. Whether the stock can be replaced quickly enough to avoid gaps in supply to the community groups that depend on it is the question the charity’s team will be working to answer in the coming days.
FareShare operates as a national network; the parent organisation, FareShare, may be in a position to redirect supplies from other regional depots to cover the shortfall. That would be the most straightforward path back to normal service. If it cannot, Thursday’s reopening will be a hollow milestone.
