Food Works Not Food Waste

Aim

Help us build Food Works, Sheffield's first sustainable food hub. Let's make a real dent in food waste, feeding people and sharing skills!

Food Works not Food Waste!

Value Your Food, Value Our Future.

Food waste is a humongous problem. If food waste were a country it would be the 3rd largest producer of carbon emissions on the planet! Globally ⅓ of ALL FOOD is wasted, thrown in the bin and sent to landfill never to see a plate, fork or belly.

Luckily we’ve been working hard for the last three years as ‘The Real Junk Food Project Sheffield’ collecting and redistributing perfectly good food that might otherwise have gone to waste. We’ve been able to save over 300 tonnes of usable food from going into the bins of Sheffield and created hundreds of thousands of meals with it. This is thanks to the support and help of a relatively small yet incredibly strong community of volunteers, food suppliers and sponsors. 

However....

This 300 tonnes is only 0.1% of the food wasted in our city.

The UN has said we’ve only got 12 years to prevent climate catastrophe so we REALLY need to get cracking on solving this!

Our vision is beyond The Real Junk Food Project Sheffield. This is about tackling food waste at home, tackling food waste where it’s produced and so much more. We started small but we know we need to think BIG to make the impact needed to help our environment.

So that's why we’re changing our name to ‘Food Works’ and running this crowdfunding project to help us secure a permanent home and to fully equip it.  We will need a big walk in fridge, some REALLY big freezers and a long term warehouse lease. We need to think bigger in every way except maybe our name, which could do with being a bit shorter. 

Supporting Food Works for Sheffield will help us to:

• Step 1: Secure a long term lease on a food hub for Sheffield.
• Step 2: Invest in adequate fridge/freezer storage.
• Step 3: Invest in an onsite kitchen.

This means we can work on increasing that 0.1% by:

• Having a stable base to operate from.
• Working with more food businesses like farms, producers and wholesalers. Currently we work with 24 food businesses but there are many hundreds in Sheffield.
• Preserving, storing, cooking and feeding people with food THE SECOND it gets to the warehouse. No delays - let’s get feeding bellies not bins asap.
• Increase our education programs to include wider age ranges and workshops for all ages.
• Getting even more people in Sheffield engaged and involved! From volunteering, to training to eating there really is something everybody can do to help.

Don't just take our word for it....

If we carry on as we are, over 90% of food wasted in Sheffield is likely to end up in anaerobic digestion or as landfill generating methane and adding to our climate’s heartbreaking situation.

By pledging to support Food Works not Food Waste in Sheffield you will have a direct impact in solving this problem. Food waste isn’t going away any time soon but we can do so much more, today, to stop it damaging our planet.

THAT'S NOT ALL....

As well as launching Food Works we will continue to grow and improve on the existing work of TRJFP Sheffield to:

Bring people together with food - Our Pay-as-you-feel cafés; Steeple Corner Café and Citrus Café at Zest, provide 10,000+ meals per year.

Broaden access to healthy food - Our Sharehouse Market provides 15,000 family food shops per year on a Pay As You Feel Basis.

Educate the next generation - Working with 15 primary schools across Sheffield we deliver healthy food weekly so the children and their families can learn all about food. Our curriculum support materials help teachers to deliver real food knowledge to the next generation.

Sustainable Catering For All - Our professional chefs deliver high quality ethical catering for weddings, meetings and conferences across Sheffield.

Train Our Volunteers, create jobs - We provide our volunteers with the opportunity to develop their skills, earn the living wage and find a route into paid employment. Our volunteers often train with our professional chefs, drive our vans to collect surplus food from over 24 stores, and work on ad hoc catering jobs within the project.

Pledge to join our Crowdfunder today to help us make Food Work not Food Waste in Sheffield!

This project successfully funded on 24th December 2018