F1 chief hits target to serve NHS staff with 1m meals
Daughter’s revelation of staff ‘living off cornflakes’ sparked an operation to feed emergency workers
AN EMOTIONAL online family chat in which a doctor revealed to her former Formula 1 chief father that exhausted NHS staff were “living off cornflakes” moved Ron Dennis to launch the SaluteTheNHS campaign to deliver a million meals to health workers.
Dr Charlotte Hall, who works in intensive care, told her family that after gruelling shifts, workers were either finding supermarket shelves stripped bare by panic buyers or were simply too tired to make anything nutritious for themselves.
That prompted Mr Dennis to launch a campaign to deliver healthy, fortifying meals to nurses and doctors on the front line.
And tomorrow, just three months after its launch, SaluteTheNHS is to hit its target and deliver its millionth meal.
An army of 800 volunteers, joined by members of the Royal family, have been packing meals and care parcels. It started with Mr Dennis, 73, donating £1million for refrigeration units, forklifts and assembly lines.
Next, he called chief executives and captains of industry to ask if they would donate food and goods.
“I found that as I was not asking for anything for myself, I could be quite pushy,” Mr Dennis said.
“I was pushing against an open door as no one had to have the cause explained to them – it really brought the best out of people.”
Among companies to donate were grocery giants, from Tesco and Unilever to Londonbased caterersAbsolute
Taste, which put together balanced meals to provide nourishment as well as sustenance.
The campaign also delivered care packages containing bath salts and moisturisers to help exhausted workers recuperate.
The public chipped in too, raising £743,000 on crowdfunding sites, which was matched pound-for-pound by the Dennis family.
The delivery firm Yodel also played an important role in the campaign, delivering food packages to health workers having to self-isolate. Yodel is owned by the Barclay family, proprietors of the Telegraph Media Group, publisher of The Sunday Telegraph.
Mr Dennis then persuaded Simon Roberts, his former McLaren F1 engineering chief, to head the operation based in an aircraft hangar in Bicester, Oxfordshire.
Mr Dennis said: “We found it very useful to create a mission – everything we did was taken on the basis that Covid-19 was the enemy.
“So we became quite military in our approach, but that created the discipline to make it work.”
The hangar had teams of 150 volunteers working in shifts to churn out thousands of meals that at the height of distribution were sent to around 50 hospitals. Last week, volunteers were joined by the Earl and Countess of Wessex, who donned hi-vis jackets and PPE to pitch in at the assembly line.
“They had a genuine desire to participate” said Mr Dennis, “and it came across to everyone they spoke to. To the volunteers, it was magical for them to experience that.”
Having met its target, the operation was due to wind down by mid-July. Mr Dennis said it would be sad for the volunteers, many of whom have made new friends over the time they had spent together. “No one should not look back on this without a sense of pride,” said Mr Dennis. “I was a facilitator but it was the volunteers that really made it happen.”