Environmental charity Hubbub has announced seven winners of its Eat It Up Fund*, which powers bold and creative solutions to tackle food waste.
In the UK, 10.7 million tonnes of food are wasted each year by UK households, food service, food manufacturers, retailers and farming.**
Now in its second year, the Eat It Up Fund looks for innovative solutions to address pre-farmgate edible waste, prevent edible food from being wasted at manufacturing and processing stage, minimise edible food waste from retailers and find ways to use surplus edible food in creative ways in communities or at home.
Meet the Eat It Up Fund Winners
This year’s winners, who will each receive a grant of up to £60,000 and support from Hubbub to develop their ideas over the coming 12 months, are:
The Felix Project
The Felix Project is London’s largest rescuer and redistributor of surplus food, supporting over 1,000 community organisations across the capital, helping to tackle London’s food poverty crisis and reduce food waste. Their grant from the Eat It Up Fund will support the development of a processing unit that will slice, dice, freeze, and create an array of soups and sauces from surplus food. This will allow them to take bulk surplus food, store and distribute, meaning they no longer have to turn surplus food away due to capacity.
Streetbox
Streetbox will repurpose surplus fresh produce that others leave behind and turn them into delicious ingredients. The project will start by rescuing 10 tonnes of surplus fresh tomatoes to turn into tinned passata sauce. Collaborating with growers and packhouses, they’ll take seasonal gluts and process them with expert chefs alongside local producers, Forage & Fern.
Angry Monk
In partnership with HERD by Will Murray & Jack Croft, Angry Monk plans to launch Herd Chefs x Angry Monk – a platform offering surplus meat, seafood and produce to the hospitality industry, supported by recipes developed by HERD. The initiative will play a pivotal role in driving HERD and Angry Monk’s shared mission to help producers sell their full output and enable chefs to use those ingredients to prepare lower cost, more sustainable menus.
The People’s Pantry
The People’s Pantry at Govanhill Baths is a community project in Glasgow that will take a grassroots approach to tackling food waste – bringing together diverse cultural groups to share skills for making delicious preserves and ready-meals from surplus food. They plan to collaborate with partner organisations to bring in traditional techniques and methods from Eastern European Roma communities and engage migrant women using traditional South Asian culinary preservation techniques.
Newcastle University
With their ‘Waste Not!’ initiative, Newcastle University aims to minimise household food waste through an innovative ‘Internet of Things’ platform assessing food freshness in fridges. This platform will combine low-cost networked sensors and a user-friendly mobile app, backed by cutting-edge technologies, to provide accurate, real-time insights, empowering users to make timely, informed decisions for easy food sharing and waste reduction within communities.
Chefs in Schools
Chefs in Schools will train school chefs and kitchen teams to deliver nutritious, delicious, inexpensive food, with creative menus to reduce food waste. The project will see the organisation engage with schools in a 10-week training programme that will involve in-person kitchen training, live online sessions and individual learning, transforming school chefs into food educators to help tackle the 96,000 tonnes of food waste that is generated by schools in England every year.
Big Ideas Company
Big Ideas Company are a social impact agency that creates new spaces for communities to come together and make lasting change. They are an all-woman team empowering participants to make a difference on the big issues. With their ‘Clean Plate’ initiative, they plan to collaborate with a prison to address the overlooked issue of food waste in prisons and create a world-first toolkit, with staff and prisoners on the ground to take to the impact in other prisons.
Since 2023, Starbucks have donated £763,442 to Hubbub, funding 13 projects to tackle food waste through innovation. (Registered Charity No. 1158700)
Last year, The Wonki Collective received a grant for their innovation 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. They now have over 120 companies buying and selling ingredients active on their platform and have saved 334 tonnes of Co2e. With their platform proving both popular and increasing active, their next step will be growing the businesses they work with and their environmental impact.***
Mark Breen, Senior Creative Partner at Hubbub said; “Food waste is a sticky problem that needs fresh ideas to address it. This year’s entries for the Eat It Up Fund have been nothing short of extraordinary. From using tech to detect food waste in fridges to transforming surplus into preserves and passata, the creativity and ambition behind these projects is inspiring. We’re excited to support these initiatives as they develop solutions that not only tackle waste but spark a movement of change for communities and industries alike.”
