One of the highlights of the industry’s calendar, Barcode 2026 saw nearly 5,000 people gather at Kenwood House in London to raise awareness for those working in the sector.
This year’s festival had performances by Wet Leg, Faithless and Scissor Sisters, and helped raise more than £1m to support the retail staff who need it most. As well as the partying, the event marks an opportunity to raise awareness for the work being down by GroceryAid.
Speaking to Convenience Store at Barcode 2026, GroceryAid chief executive Kieran Hemsworth and welfare director Mandi Leonard explained how the number of requests for support has grown over the past year.
“In the last financial year, we saw an increase in applications for financial support, for financial relief grants,” explains Leonard. “We also supported over 11,000 people through the school essentials grants, our financial relief grants and our cost-of-living grants as well.”
Late last year, GroceryAid shifted up its branding and launched a new awareness campaign to highlight the services on offer.
Hemsworth says that since this campaign went live, awareness has skyrocketed. “In essence, we’ve helped about 20,000 people last year. We’ve spent probably about £6.5m to £7m on welfare support but we’re only just really scratching the surface.
“The biggest issue is just the level of awareness that people have of GroceryAid, just people being reminded that we’re there. And interestingly enough, we did our first awareness campaign where we’ve actually spent a bit of money talking to people. and getting our message out there. Since we’ve done that, we saw a 32% increase in our financial grant application.”
Awareness has always been an issue for the charity, and Hemsworth explains why GroceryAid is constantly striving to improve on that. “The biggest barrier in terms of people come to us is just that pure level of awareness.
“The second biggest one then is there’s a stigma. You know, a lot of people we help, they are really proud, hard-working people that are doing early shifts, they’re on their feet all day, often in difficult, conditions and they don’t like reaching out to a charity.
“Therefore in all our messaging we talk now about this is not a charity handout, this is the help that you’ve already earned by putting all that effort in. So don’t feel bad about reaching out to us at all. So hopefully that begins to overcome the stigma. Another way that we do, you’ll see in all our messaging here, we use real grocery workers in all of our advertising. And again, people can see themselves in the characters in our adverts. And I think that also then reduces the level of stigma.”
Leonard believes there’s so much more support that can be provided. “We know there are so many more people we could be helping if they just knew about us and breaking down that stigma is a big piece for us.
“We treat every financial grant application confidentially, completely with empathy, with no judgment. And it’s really important to stress through all of our services that it is that complete confidentiality piece as well. We’re not going to report back to an employer who’s had a financial grant or who’s had counsellor from us.”
With the needs of the public changing, GroceryAid has moved to adapt as well, increasing its suite of services to provide more support. Leonard explains some of the new services.
“We’ve recently introduced a partnership with the National Autistic Society. We’re seeing more colleagues come to us for financial support where a child is either awaiting an autism diagnosis or an adult in the family or has been diagnosed. And it’s impacting that household finances because quite often one parent might have to stop working to care for that child if they’re in and out of school or not in a school. environment that’s safe for them. So, we’ve started the partnership to provide for those who are eligible, paid for support, but we’ve also got a signposting page on our website that anyone can use.”
She also highlights some of the high intensity counselling that’s on offer. “We introduced some high intensity counselling in October last year, which is really difficult to get on the NHS. The high intensity counselling is high intensity Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, and post PTSD diagnosis counselling, providing 12 to 20 sessions for colleagues. And we can have somebody in counselling within 10 days.
“We’ve seen an 84% increase in our structured counselling sessions across the high intensity and the six sessions of solution focused therapy as well. We’re really starting to see the impact of our awareness campaigns coming through, more people coming to us. But I think that high intensity counselling indicates the more complex needs that people have today with their mental health.”
Barcode itself is both a celebration and a way driving further awareness, explains Leonard. “You’ve got about 4,600 people from the industry here who work really hard and they’re going to have a day where they can really enjoy themselves. It’s great in terms of the customer networking - it’s fantastic that all the brands come along and want to activate as well. And then all the money that we make from this, which will be over a million pounds, goes directly into our welfare fund to help the people in need within the industry.
“Barcode has very different demographics to some of the events that we hold, both in scalability, the number of people we have here, but because we have people here working from all areas of the industry as well. Everybody who’s come here, they’re all going to go home and back into the office, back onto the factory floor, back into their store and talk about GroceryAid. And it might just be that a colleague overhears them or they signpost a colleague.”
With a packed schedule of fundraising events for GroceryAid, what changes are on the horizon for the charity? “We have a very clear strategy,” explains Hemsworth. “At the end of the day, what we want to do is try to help more people. And we know the need is much bigger than the 20,000 people that we’re currently helping. So, we will be pushing really hard to improve the level of awareness that we have of GroceryAid.
“From a welfare perspective, we’re looking at how we can improve the accessibility of our offer as well. We did a bit of work in terms of the website and improving the customer journey on the website as well. And then from an event perspective, what’s really interesting for us is essentially we get into a situation, which is a challenge, because we’re driving much better levels of awareness, we’re starting to eat into a deficit in terms of the amount of money that we’re spending on welfare and therefore there’s a bit of a funding challenge that we need to push harder on.
“What I want to do is make sure that everybody comes along to our events so that we can raise more income to help more people.”
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