On Tuesday 4th February from 12pm – 2pm, pupils from four schools in the Southwark area will be taking to the stalls of London’s iconic Borough Market for the annual Young Marketeers’ Winter Sale, where they will be selling their own waste-free homemade soups using surplus vegetables, with freshly baked bread.
The Winter Sale is being held as part of Borough Market and School Food Matters’ Young Marketeers programme. Now in its eighth year, the programme teaches students about food and cookery as well as giving them the entrepreneurial skills to market and sell their goods on a real-life market stall, thanks to advice from the Market’s expert traders.
The pupils attended two workshops earlier this year and have since been working on developing their own recipes. The first workshop was held at The Cookhouse in Borough Market, teaching the students how to make two different vegetable-based soups using seasonal produce. The second took place at Bread Ahead Bakery, where they learnt how to make scrumptious warm ciabatta loaves.
As part of the programme, the children gain an understanding of food poverty and waste in the UK with all funds raised from the sale going to FareShare, a charity that collects surplus food and distributes it across the country. The children visited FareShare’s London depot to see the surplus produce and learn how it can be used to create delicious meals. They then collected surplus vegetables to make their own soups at school. 224 charities and community groups have benefited from the charity in London alone. Every £1 raised at the sale will provide four meals for vulnerable families across the capital.
The Young Marketeers will be peddling their freshly made produce in the Green Market, home to the Borough’s Food Futures Market – a programme that supports start-up traders seeking to address the food world’s most compelling challenges.
Community is at the heart of Borough Market and it’s seasonal events like these which give London’s young people an insight in to how to live a healthy, sustainable life. To date, the Young Marketeers programme has given 22,772 students the chance to learn valuable skills and £6,341 has been raised for Fareshare, providing 25,364 meals for vulnerable families.
Hatty Cary, Community Engagement Manager at Borough Market, said: “With topics such as waste and climate change high on the agenda for young people – particularly in the last year – events like this are becoming increasingly important for the next generation of Londoners. By teaching young people where their food has come from, how to grow it and what to make with it while also giving them an awareness of food waste, we hope to inspire young people to take a more sustainable approach to their food in the future.”
Borough Market has a longstanding commitment to reducing waste. None of the Market’s rubbish goes to landfill, with all cardboard, paper, plastic, glass and wood being recycled and the remaining food waste going to an anaerobic digestion plant to be turned into power, fertiliser and water. In 2017, Borough Market removed all plastic bottles and installed drinking fountains around the estate and in 2019 it became the first food market in the UK to replace plastic carrier bags with a fully biodegradable alternative, made from GM-free cornstarch.
For more information on the Winter Sale, visit: https://boroughmarket.org.uk/events/young-marketeers-winter-soup-sale
