An army of volunteers boxed up 7,900 meals for the world’s most hungry people.

Around 30 locals gathered in a church hall at the top of the Slough High Street last month to pack millions of tiny lentils and grains of rice into bags, seal them up and send them off to those who are in desperate need of food.

Slough Baptist Church (SBC) rallied together volunteers from different walks of life and teamed up with the charity Feed the Hungry to run the ‘hand to hand’ project.

The idea of the initiative is that the group who have signed up to pack the food, raise the cash to pay for the ingredients – which are provided by the charity.

The team are then challenged with the task of organising a ‘conveyor belt’ chain of people to bag, weigh, seal and box up the food.

The team at SBC organised a barn dance in the new year and a surge of donations meant they got together £1,500.

At around 22p per meal, it meant the group had enough money for plenty of ingredients.

In the end they sent off the batch of 7,900 meals to Burkina Faso in West Africa.

But the location could change depending on where in the world most needs the delivery.

It was hailed a roaring success by one of the packers Ewan King – who said the group were hoping to make the food packing an annual thing.

He said: “The set up took the most time – but in the end we boxed up nearly 8,000 meals and it only took us an hour and a half.

“Altogether there were about 25 to 30 of us volunteering.

“We kind of got into the swing of things – it was just really good getting together.

“There were so many different people there – it was a nice sense of community.

“The idea of food packing is quite big in America, but not so much in the UK. I heard of it through a radio station – but it is such a good idea.

“With everybody coming together to help we made enough money to box up food and send it off to people who don’t have anything.

“It was so easy to do as well, we had a Caleigh to raise money in January and then once we had everything in place, some people from the charity drove down from the north to give us everything we needed- they were fantastic.”