Personal trainer Mike Hind helping to feed three thousand children on Teesside over Christmas

Early this morning, at a supermarket in the Tees Valley, cages and trolleys of food are stacked ready and waiting.

Outside, 16 pallets - too many to fit in the store - are waiting on a lorry. Food worth £40,000 is being packaged up into food parcels.

The project has been spearheaded by the Teesside personal trainer Mike Hind, who says he's determined that children across Redcar and Cleveland should not go hungry this Christmas.

"It was apparent that there was a group of children who didn't qualify for free school meals, who were still going to be left out over Christmas", Mike says. "So I decided to try and do something to ensure that no child went to bed hungry over the festive period."

Mike, who is best known for helping his friend Dibsy McClintock’s lose 20 stone has helped raise enough money to provide two meals a day and breakfast for 3,000 children throughout the school holidays.

The food will go out to 59 schools in Redcar and Cleveland...how to get it there was a logistical challenge.

The supermarket Morrisons has helped the campaign by offering a discount on food. Neil Pinkney, who manages a store, says organising the delivery of the food has taken six weeks of planning.

"We've managed to create a system that snakes around the cafe and my pickers can work along and walk around and keep socially distanced and collect everything in."

Gary Clarke from the Cleveland Mountain Rescue is among the volunteers helping to deliver the parcels.

"What a fantastic initiative it is, so we're well pleased to get involved", he says. 

"Not exactly the great weather for doing it but we're used to doing this sort of thing in these sort of weathers."

Delivering all the food to schools will take two days. Teachers have identified which families are in need.

Carl Faulkner from Normanby Primary School says: "We know our parents, we know our kids really well, so we know who to target to make a real difference."

A parent at the school says the scheme is "amazing."

"You know there's so many people here who are just at that line where you're not eligible for anything benefits but you're just trying to keep going", she says. 

"So it does lift you a bit to know you're going to get something, you know, it relieves that pressure."