The Hive Cornwall: food rescue for people & planet

Aim

Build community food production unit to salvage food & produce & distribute ingredients that stop hunger and cut emissions in Cornwall

We reckon that every year in Cornwall:

 - 87000 tonnes of food is wasted before reaching consumers

 - at least 5000 households experience regular food insecurity

 The Hive Cornwall works to reduce both these numbers to zero.  

Using borrowed facilities and volunteers the charity produced and distributed almost 150,000 meals between March and December 2020, recovering over 20 tonnes of food that would otherwise have gone to waste, thereby diverting around 60 tonnes of CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalent) from the atmosphere.  We are now saving an average of 5 tonnes of food a week = 15 tonnes of carbon per week!

We are already building a dedicated 'Hive Hub' to increase the amount of food we can rescue, store and process.  It should be built by February when we can start pickling, powdering and otherwise preserving ingredients for use by any social purpose groups that can use them.  Our ambition is to save 1000 tonnes of food a year by 2023 and prove the concept.  

While we have currently put our cooking / food production on hold until we get our Hive Hub up and running, The Hive Cornwall works with over a dozen local community partners, a network of amazing volunteers and a rented refrigerated lorry to recover and distribute around 5 tonnes of food a week. Led by Hive Cornwall co-chair Babs Rounsevell, the volunteers collect the food surplus and race against time to get it straight out to the frontline groups who distribute it in their communities in food boxes, cook-ups or ready meals.

It is not as easy as it sounds to make all this work.  Apart from fitting in with the food donors' systems and timings, we depend on a passionate network of community partners to take the food we bring them and get it to where it is most needed. We need to raise at least £30,000 to fund the operating costs of our community partners in this financial year.  It costs about £500 a month just to insure one vehicle to keep the food fresh and get it where it's needed; a huge amount of money for a small community group.  Together with volunteer costs and a bit of staff support our community partners need £6,000 per month to be able to operate their food distribution services.

Once this is all up and running, our business plan is for the majority of these running costs to be covered through sales income - we plan to earn about £150 per tonne of food rescued.  We just need your help please to get us all set up.

We are blessed with some fantastic relationships with food donors who do their best to cut food waste out of their systems.  They have had a really tough couple of years with the pandemic and labour shortages making it very difficult to get all their food to market at the right time.  The Hive Cornwall takes wholesale food donations just before the food heads for disposal, and delivers it to community groups feeding people all over Cornwall.  

We registered as a charity in February 2020 as part of Cornwall’s Covid response. with a focus on transforming food surplus generated by growers, food producers & food wholesalers into ready meals for distribution in partnership with many local established community organisations across Cornwall, in particular CHAOS Cornwall whose founder is also the Hive Cornwall co-chair.

We have now been offered a grant of almost £1/2 million to build the Hive Hub and buy three vehicles to support it and hire a tiny team to set up food outreach services across Cornwall, which is GREAT NEWS... but... to make it all happen we need to match the grant with 10% cash match to cover the costs of our community partners when they take responsibility for actually getting the food to where it is most needed. National charity Feeding Britain has offered some financial support and we are asking the Crowd to help us close the gap. We are really really chuffed and very very grateful that Aviva have brought us inside their community fund which means that donations this week will be matched pound for pound. Fingers crossed!

This project successfully funded on 7th December 2021