Local food
The challenge
The Mayor of London and Groundwork are looking for innovators to develop solutions that help tackle food insecurity across London’s local communities.
Focused on the London Borough of Barnet initially, however the system should be designed to be replicable across other boroughs in future.
All local food actors: community food projects and banks, local shops, restaurant and venue owners with excess food, and the donating public.
- Through Barnet Together, Groundwork London manages the Barnet Food Hub, supporting the local food bank network and supplying over 15 food banks, including Trussell Trust groups, charities and grassroots/faith groups.
- Groundwork London’s supplies top up local food bank donations received from many sources - surplus food suppliers (Felix Project / FareShare), restaurants, shops, businesses, organisations and public donations.
- Due to COVID-19, levels of food donation are high, but still do not meet demand. There is the need to promote donating, especially in the context of national food poverty and insecurity.
- Demand for food support is high and expected to rise. There is a lot of interest in how community food projects can contribute, from community cafes, allotments and holiday hunger support to community fridges.
- Per annum 640,000 tonnes of edible food is thrown away by households in London, not including food businesses, venues and restaurants.
- In Barnet alone 35,000 households experience food insecurity.
The solution
Create a digital service that effectively manages the flow of food in Barnet, maximizes referrals (need) and supply (excess food/donations), and creates predictable patterns for and with local actors to more efficiently provide food to people who need it.
A local food management system that enables those in the Barnet network community to log data, make requests, connect peer-to-peer, match donations with need and push out information to respond to predicted demand and crisis. It should be built initially as a tool that works across Barnet’s actors, but ultimately be easily transferable to work for other local/borough food systems.
In the long term, the aim is to create a sustainable local food system that reduces food waste and meets the need of all people in food poverty or insecurity in Barnet – and able to support other local food systems to achieve the same aim.
- A more responsive flow of donations to existing food projects.
- More active engagement in local food need and community food projects.
- A better connected local food system.
- Open data to support understanding of the local food system.
Winners and finalists
Each team will receive £10,000 and the opportunity to work closely over five weeks with the Resilience Partner behind their challenge – which include councils, government agencies, BIDs and charities – to develop their solution. They’ll also receive specialised support in service design, pitch coaching, data usage, navigating government procurement processes and more.
At the end of the first phase, the judges will review each team’s progress and choose one winner in each challenge, to be awarded £40,000 each and the chance to implement their solution.
The Spaze Food Management Platform (SFMP) is a cloud-based resource management platform that enables a systemic coordination of all local food stakeholders to effectively manage the supply and demand of food to tackle food insecurity.
We are grateful and excited to be a part of the Mayors Resilience Fund as it gives us the opportunity to work along remarkable organisations and fully focus our efforts in developing what can become a scalable solution for one of our city’s biggest challenges. Being the SFMP an easy-to-use digital platform, the scaling-up and scaling-out potential of our solution is endless, not only for Barnet and other boroughs in London, but for the rest of the UK.
Ciro Reynoso, CEO of Spaze ltd.
Local Food Network is a system of applications that open up a living, breathing picture of a local community’s food projects to each of its actors, and empowers them with the tools to fulfil their roles more impactfully.
The app will be underpinned by an adaptive, constantly learning demand monitoring and prediction model, powered by our open-sourced time series data, pushing alerts to volunteers so as to prevent food crises before they develop.
As a group of tech and design nerds with experience of volunteering in local food banks, we’re super excited to have been given the opportunity with the MRF to craft an innovative solution that makes a tangible difference for the most vital of community institutions.
Time to Spare is a software platform that allows local food providers to work together as a network to share information on the needs of their users, their stock levels and what services they are running. This helps each member to understand their own impact better and that of the network as a whole. All this can be shared on a public page, that allows those outside of the network to see how they can help and if they need support themselves, where that is available.
We are very excited about working with Groundwork and the amazing food providers in Barnet to further develop our tools, so that they can support even more of those most in need. We are also excited about amazing opportunities and networks that the Mayor’s Resilience Fund provides.
About the partner
Groundwork London (GL) is a green community regeneration charity. Active for 30 years, each year delivering hundreds of community-driven programmes, from creating community gardens to helping 10,000 households reduce water use. GL is part of Barnet Together, a partnership which unites local people, charities and businesses to innovate and thrive.
- Access to data about food demand and understanding of the operational needs of local food projects.
- Understanding of the local food scene and the types of actors that are already engaged or are target audiences.
- Information about food waste – its sources and examples of projects / approaches.
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