Barcode Festival 2025, GroceryAid’s annual fundraiser, has raised more than £1.4M for the charity.
On a blisteringly sunny day, some 5,300 people including suppliers, retailers and workers from across the industry flocked to Kenwood House in London’s Hampstead Heath to enjoy food, drink and networking opportunities.
Music was provided by the likes of Chase and Status, Confidence Man and Soul II Soul.
Grocery Trader caught up with Mandy Leonard, Welfare Director at GroceryAid and Kieran Hemsworth, CEO of GroceryAid to find out more about the event.
How long have you been at GroceryAid?
ML: I’ve been with the business for just over eight years. I oversee all of the strategic welfare programmes, the programmes of support that we provide for colleagues, be it financial, emotional, practical, it all comes under my remit and my team.
KH: It’s been two years, not a long period of time. I’ve worked in the grocery industry for 30 years.
Where did you work previously?
ML: For 15 years I worked for a charity called The Salespeople’s Charity that helped B2B sales reps. There’s some crossover with GroceryAid, because a lot of reps work in the grocery business.
KH: I worked at Unilever, Coca-Cola, I ran Ginsters, PZ Cussons, the soap company, before I ended up here,
What is the purpose of Barcode?
ML: Barcode is one of 16 central events that we run each year, but this is one of our flagship events. It’s our largest attended event. We had 5,300 people attend the event. This year was the first time we were at Kenwood House. We’ve moved from Magazine London, so it’s the first time we’ve had it on a greenfield site. The ultimate purpose is to raise funds for the charity. That’s why we do everything we do – to raise funds so that I can spend them. But it’s also a phenomenal day to get retailers and suppliers together to celebrate this great industry that we work in, to give suppliers the opportunity to showcase some new product. It is also for the retailers to do some networking and entertaining and have fun. It’s a tough industry to be working in at the moment, it really is, regardless of where you are within any business, and Barcode is about coming together, supporting the industry charity, but having a great time as well.
KH: Barcode saw 5,300 people attend, which is fantastic. That’s up from 4,600 last year, and that’s because we’ve come to this new site where we’ve been able to increase the capacity. We have a lot more space now, we’ve got 117 brands activating, 270 companies bought tickets for it. Around 1,000 retailers attended. I think it provides a number of things. It provides an opportunity to activate your brand in an emotive way in front of the retail trade, which I always think is a good thing. It gives you the opportunity for customer networking. Also, companies are using it as a reward and recognition. You’ve got organisations buying their whole team tickets and using it like their summer party or as a recognition. If somebody’s done a great thing during the year, they get invited along to Barcode, which works out in terms of what Barcode is all about commercially. But I think you’ve always got to remember that all the money that we make at Barcode goes into our welfare fund so that we can help more people who are in need in the grocery industry.
How popular was demand for tickets?
ML: They’ve been really popular. We moved site because we had a waiting list last year. Last year we were capped at 4000 people so we sold 1,500 more tickets this year, more supporters, more activations at the event. It can only grow, and we’ve got the room to do it at Kenwood House, which is fantastic.
KH: It was really popular. Last year, when we were on the smaller site, just by the O2, we used to sell out. It was 4,600 people; we couldn’t get anyone else into that site. We took the decision this year to go to a much bigger site so that we could increase the capacity. With 5,300 tickets sold, that’s something like a 15% growth year on year, and gives us more space to activate more brands.
How much money did the festival raise this year?
ML: Barcode Festival 2025 raised more than £1.4M for GroceryAid. It’s a major part of our fundraising, 82% of the funds that come into the charity come from our events that we run. It’s super important that we see that grow, because we’re seeing an increase in demand for our services. We need to be able to fund those increased requests.
How does that amount compare to last year?
ML: It will be similar. Coming to a new site, there’s some increased costs. But it raised well over a million pounds, which is phenomenal. If we stay at Kenwood House another few years, it can only grow.
KH: It raised about £1.3 million last year.
There must have been an extra cost involved in moving to Kenwood House?
KH: Yes, that was the risk in terms of moving, you increase capacity, but you’ve got to build some of the infrastructure. You’ve got to be able to then cover the cost of that extra infrastructure and then to grow. But, we see this as a multi-year project, and this will happen over a period of time, so we’re expecting to more than cover the extra cost that’s required, which is really important, so that more of that money then flows through to helping more and more people in the grocery sector.
How can companies build brand awareness at the festival?
ML: Brand awareness of the festival is about engaging with one of our sales team, having conversations with them. Because we’ve got this footprint now, because we’ve got this greenfield site, we can pretty much do what we want to do. It’s about talking with the sales teams about what would work for your brand, what would fit within the footprint that we’ve got, and really being creative. There were some phenomenal activations at the festival, some really exciting stuff. It’s about, how we can work with you to make it good for your brand, and then that awareness will just grow.
What kind of work does GroceryAid do?
ML: We provide financial, emotional, practical support for anybody who’s working in the grocery industry, an industry of about 2.8 million people, and not only grocery colleagues, but also their partners, spouses and dependants in their household. We provide non-repayable financial grants which colleagues can apply for, subject to eligibility criteria. It’s for people who are going through a difficult time, they may have had to move to statutory sick pay at work because of long term illness, either themselves or their partner, they have seen an unexpected drop in income that means they are struggling to pay their priority debts. It might be a relationship breakdown. It might be somebody who has fled domestic violence, or they face homelessness, or are at risk of homelessness. My grants team can support with advice and guidance around what financial support might be available.
There is also emotional support: we run a 24/7 free and confidential helpline. That is accessible not only to colleagues, but also to partners, spouses and dependants over 16 in their household. We offer structured counselling, for relationship and family and some child and youth counselling. We also give some practical advice. We work with a telephone legal specialist who can give specialist legal advice. They are all completely free and all completely confidential. Your employer will never know that you’ve spoken to anybody at GroceryAid.
KH: We look after the welfare of the 2.8 million people who work in the grocery industry, and our purpose is to support and care for grocery workers and their families when they go through tough times. What that actually means is if, for example, you needed to cut down the number of hours that you work because you become ill, or you have to care for somebody in your household, or you need to move house, you need to be rehomed, or you’re fleeing a domestic violence issue, we will step in and help people financially. We’ll do financial grants, but also emotionally. We will help out in terms of mental health challenges, and then also practically. We work with people like Shelter in terms of helping rehoming people, but also we pay for legal fees if there are legal issues. It’s quite broad ranging in terms of the support that we offer. And of course, everything that we do is totally free and totally confidential as well.
How are you getting your message across to the people who are need funding from GroceryAid?
ML: We work really closely with the HR teams and the occupational health, mental health, first aiders, wellbeing champions in businesses. We do presentations, we will talk about support services that are available, and then those businesses work with our comms team to put messaging out. There might be some electronic messaging, there might be posters, back of the toilet door posters work really well. We’ll work with supporters, we’ll work with retailers, manufacturers, suppliers, with how they communicate with their colleagues and find the best way to get that messaging out to colleagues. Awareness isn’t where it needs to be. We need to get that awareness up. So that’s part of the plan, part of our 2030 strategy is to increase our awareness.
KH: This is one of our biggest challenges. We do a great job in terms of getting the message out there at the moment, but I think we could do even better. We work with organisations to ensure that there’s clarity of message going out all the way through those organisations, right down to the front line, to the people on the till, people working in stores, people working in warehouses, people working in production lines. We’ve started, interestingly enough, using things like social media. We’re able to target people who work in the grocery industry through the Meta platforms. We’re doing quite a bit of work in terms of getting our message out via things like Facebook and Instagram and actually talking to people ourselves. And then, of course, the messages come through during events like Barcode, with 5,300 people attending. Some of them would have heard of GroceryAid. Not all of them would have heard of GroceryAid. We build awareness through the events that we run. We did a raffle in May this year, and we sold 50,000 tickets, that’s another opportunity to drive that awareness message.
What are the biggest challenges that GroceryAid faces?
ML: Awareness, people knowing that we’re here. We provided 140,000 incidences of support last year, which was up from 78,000 the year before, so a massive increase. But we employ 2.6 million people in the grocery industry. From research, we recognise about 12% of people working in our industry would need support at any time when they are facing some challenges and difficulties, some tough times, and we need to be closer to 300,000 incidences of support. Our biggest challenge is raising awareness. We’re almost the industry’s best kept secret.
KH: If we want to help more people, the biggest lever we can pull in terms of doing that is improving the level of awareness that people have of our welfare provision on the frontline of grocery. If you talk to frontline grocery workers about the services that we offer, and you show them a list of service providers, only 23% of them will have heard of GroceryAid. We know we can do a much better offer, and that’s why we want to work with more organisations driving that message. But it’s a branded challenge in a way. We need to make sure that we’re driving that message through social media and doing things a little bit differently using ambassadors.
We work with Thomas Robson Kanu as one of our ambassadors. We’re trying lots of different creative ways in terms of getting that message out to the people who need it.
What is the most exciting thing about your job?
ML: The reason I love my job is because every single day, a member of my team changes somebody’s life for the better, and it’s a really powerful reason to get up in the morning. And I get to come to days like Barcode and talk about grocery. I’m really passionate about what we do and the support we provide. I love the fact that we change people’s lives. I love the fact that we can provide that support, and I love the fact that I get the opportunity to come out and speak to the industry about it.
KH: Everything. So not only putting on events like Barcode, which is just amazing, and we do 16 events a year, but I think the most exciting thing to me is the fact that you wake up every day and the team helped somebody new, and that is the most exciting and rewarding thing, just helping people. To help them get through their day, it’s worth so much to be able to do that.
What are your plans for Barcode for next year?
ML: Bigger and better, I believe we’re coming back to Kenwood House again. We want to spread the word, get more people involved, get more people here. And hopefully, order the sunshine again.
KH: Let’s go bigger and better, I think. We will be at Kenwood House again next year. I think there’s opportunities to grow it, even from this scale, which is amazing.
Comments are closed.