Why rice packing?

What is rice packing?

It’s quite simple really.

At a rice packing event, teams follow a recipe to pack a nutritionally rich, simple meal. The recipe provides someone with most of the carbs, proteins and vitamins that they need to survive for an extended period of time. It’s a mix of rice, lentils, soya, vitamins and minerals, measured out into specific quantities.

This high nutrition rice mix is put into bags, which are then weighed, sealed and packed into boxes, ready to be shipped out to wherever they’re needed.

We send these meals out to over 560,000 children across the world in need of daily nutritious food. For many children, this may be their only nutritional meal a day.

Why do businesses come and pack rice meals?

Every business recognises the importance of team. And every business has CSR and ESG goals to meet. Rice packing contributes to the health of your team and contributes to your CSR and ESG goals.

But, more importantly, it’s fun! Teams who come and pack meals with us love it. There’s friendly competition, milestones to hit celebrated by a giant gong and a sense of group purpose as we work together to pack thousands of meals.

In diverse, multi-cultural teams, the international reach of our work is very attractive. Packing food by hand gives you a direct connection to someone else in another country.

The next person to handle the food will likely be a cook in the destination country, who will prepare this meal for a hungry child. The human connection with those in need around the world makes rice packing a world changing activity.

Isn’t packing food in one country and sending it to another a waste of time and resource? Couldn’t this be done locally?

That’s making the assumption that there is food available locally.

We’re sending food to a lot of countries where there simply isn’t basic food available, or it’s prohibitively expensive for those on a low income. Climate change is making it increasingly difficult to grow crops in southern Africa.

In early-2025, it’s estimated that 6 million people in Zimbabwe – over a third of the population – will be food-insecure.

We’re working to set up local community farming projects in places like Zimbabwe and Zambia so that food can increasingly be grown in-country, but that’s not a simple or quick solution. For someone who is starving today, rice meals packed by teams in the UK and being sent overseas is an absolute Godsend.

Rice packing helps people survive and brings stability, so that we can work with their communities to help them become sustainable. These meals are a vital part of that journey.

How is this funded?

Team days with us are priced around the cost of providing the ingredients, the bags, the boxes and shipping the food to its destination. Excluding shipping, the rice meals cost about 25p each.

Businesses make a donation to cover the cost of the team day. This varies depending on factors such as the size of the team and the number of meals to be packed.

I’m interested… What happens next?

If your business wants to run a food packing event, please get in touch with us. Our team will contact you and will work with you to see how a food packing event could be run in your context.

We’re so grateful to everyone who runs or takes part in meal packing. The difference that these meals make to those receiving them is immense – for a child who has nothing to eat, this food is world changing.