A Pontarddulais supermarket has emerged as the best in the UK for making sure its unsold food goes to charities and community groups, new figures have revealed.

Tesco Pontarddulais Superstore topped the table of donations to local causes from Tesco superstores across the UK through the Community Food Connection scheme run in conjunction with food redistribution charity FareShare.

With the scheme marking its third birthday this month, colleagues at the store were treated to a party to mark their achievement.

Thanks to Community Food Connection every Tesco store in the UK is able to donate its surplus food at the end of the day – but no store has donated so much of its unsold food as Pontarddulais.

Store Manager Katherine Edwards said: “We really see ourselves as a community store, and have a brilliant relationship with the local charities that receive unsold food from us at the end of the day, but we never thought we would be the best in the country.

“We really enjoy donating our surplus food, because we know the difference it makes to the groups that we work with in Pontarddulais.”

Under the Community Food Connection scheme a different charity or community group is allocated to collect from the store for each day of the week.

At the end of the day store colleagues send the group a text to tell them what unsold food is available to be collected from the store. The group can then take what they want from the donation on offer.

Tesco’s Head of Community Alec Brown said: “At Tesco we firmly believe that no food that is fit to eat should go to waste.

"That is why we set up Community Food Connection, with more than 22 million meals-worth of food distributed to good causes to date.

“Our Pontarddulais Superstore has been at the forefront of that, showing what a difference Community Food Connection can make.

"The whole team in Pontarddulais should be really proud of this achievement as our most generous store for donations across the UK.”

FareShare Chief Executive Lindsay Boswell said: “Congratulations to the team at Pontarddulais for all their hard work in making sure that good food doesn’t go to waste.

"I have always said that the best way of using surplus food is getting it to people in need, and the Tesco team at Pontarddulais have been wonderfully successful in achieving that.”