2024 Eat It Up Initiatives
Sow the City: Grounds to Grow
Manchester based social enterprise Sow the City has teamed up with Starbucks stores to collect waste coffee grounds, to cultivate mushrooms in. The oyster mushrooms that their volunteers harvest are for them to eat as well as being packaged and distributed by e-bike. Spent mushroom blocks are re-purposed as soil conditioner and re-distributed to Sow the City’s community garden network.
Tom’s Feast: Forgotten Feast
Headed up by eco-chef, food writer and food waste campaigner Tom Hunt, Tom’s Feast have developed an ice creams from surplus fruit, veg and dairy under the name ‘Good Lick’. Innovative sourcing and inventive flavours using commonly wasted food items mean tastebuds are tickled and awareness is raised.
The Hornbeam Centre
The Hornbeam Centre have been rescuing surplus food from farmers in East Anglia and South-East England and distributing it to food cooperatives, pantries, and other mutual-aid initiatives across Waltham Forest. They’re developing a farm surplus redistribution model to support people at risk of experiencing food poverty.
Northhampton Town FC Community Trust
Using the power of football, this community campaign is inspiring families in Northamptonshire to tackle food waste. With Planet League they’ve offered a gamified experience, setting football fans and their friends and families challenges from turning their leftovers into delicious new meals to transforming vegetable peelings into crisps. A series of fun workshops have further amplified the campaign and brought the whole community together to bring food waste right down. (Winner of The British Association for Sustainable Sport Fan Engagement Award 2024)
The Wonki Collective
Food waste costs UK food manufacturers £6.7bn annually whilst unnecessarily emitting 2.4m tonnes of greenhouse gases. The Wonki Collective is on a mission to stop supply chain waste. They have pioneered the first business-to-business matchmaking technology to enable food and drink manufacturers to efficiently identify and sell surplus ingredients. Our funding has helped them to advance their technology whilst supporting more manufacturers to identify surplus as early as possible to maximise nutritional and commercial value.
Natural Resources Institute (NRI), University of Greenwich
The NRI are upcycling brewer’s spent grain (BSG) to create a meat alternative burger. The project, led by Dr Parag Acharya and Dr Micael De Andrade Lima, combines shelf-life studies and eco-innovative extraction of BSG protein to create a plant-based meat, making it a comprehensive approach to addressing food waste and sustainable food production.
