ESTABLISHING THE NETWORK
As the Coronavirus crisis hit, it quickly became clear that food poverty was on the rise and the number of vulnerable people who could not access food was far higher than any of the existing structures supporting food insecurity could cope with.
We helped Southwark create a generic shopping list and, through the Good Food Wholesale network, connected them with Bestway, the UK’s largest private Cash and Carry to access stock at lowest wholesale prices. Despite very limited availability, Bestway fulfilled an initial order of just under 3000 cases in less than three days which has gone on to feed 1200 vulnerable people for the next four-eight weeks.
“The crisis required us to quickly think about how we could help pivot our expertise to where it could really make a difference.” – Stephanie Rice
REPEATING THE MODEL
This model is being promoted as a solution to ensuring a diverse food supply in London and nationally and an answer for dealing with the exceptional volumes of people needing help. Sustain co-authored and published the report below. We have helped promote this to The London Strategic Co-ordination Group and Sustain’s co-ordinator catch up with an audience of 40-50 key partners working on food provision during the crisis.
Full Report available to download here.