It was an early start for the Procurement for Good team, gathering at the Better Food Shed in Bow, London on Tuesday 11th March.

It was an early start for the Procurement for Good team, gathering at the Better Food Shed in Bow, London on Tuesday 11^th March. We were met with delicious coffee, cake and the sounds and sights of a busy food hub. Pallets arriving, leaving, fork-lift trucks doing their dance and delivery vans setting out for various locations across London, all loaded with tasty fruit and veg.

The Better Food Shed was set up in 2019 when a group of already established growers with a successful market in north London and various veg box schemes had out-grown their respective markets. Growing Communities, Organic Lea and Local Greens got together and realised there was scope for their operations to go wholesale, buying on behalf of a network of veg box schemes. The Better Food Shed now operates as Growing Communities’ non-profit wholesale arm, supplying ethically sourced, local and organic produce, majority sourced within 70 miles of London. Despite still being a young operation, the Shed is currently turning over £1.5 million in produce sales. Importantly, the aggregation of their buying power allows them to keep prices fair, while giving better access and prices to the farmers and growers they work with.

As part of Growing Communities, the Better Food Shed operates according to the same buying policy and key values:

• We are mission driven - trading for social purpose, not just to maximise profit
• We are committed to transparency, trust and cooperation throughout the food supply chain
• We source food sustainably, using the food zones as a framework
• We trade fairly
• We champion ecological food and farming
• We promote a diet that is good for people and planet
• We operate in a low-carbon way
• We build a strong community in support of this work
• We strive to change the wider food system

 For more details check out their website:  https://growingcommunities.org/our-buying-policy

The Better Food Shed currently supplies 20 tonnes of organic, seasonal fruit and veg a week, to 20 food businesses and council services, who in turn, feed over 10,000 people a week, including two primary schools in Hackney, and Barking and Dagenham’s Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) programme.

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Danny Fisher, Head of the Better Food Shed and Deputy Director of Growing Communities, explains that though the Shed has capacity to increase supply, including to many more schools, there are a whole host of challenges which make scaling up challenging, and it’s not just price. For schools, limited storage and refrigeration mean they need small and frequent deliveries, which isn’t cost effective for the Shed. The type of produce they want is also challenging, as it’s predominantly European (when the UK tomatoes and cucumbers etc are ready, school’s out!). In addition, catering staff are often paid poorly and are not supported when it comes to adapting menus. Julie Brown, Director of Growing Communities, further explains that the system through which public procurement of food is managed in schools is complex and varied; there is no ‘one-size fits all’ approach, with different schools, boroughs and councils operating in different ways.

We hope as part of this project to be able to support the Better Food Shed in its ambitions to expand food access and enable local, sustainable procurement, while continuing to support local organic growers.

So, what’s next for the Better Food Shed? Continue to provide fantastic quality, organic produce, continue to build the supply chain, improve access and crack public procurement!!

To find out more, get in touch through the website.  

Thanks again to the Better Food Shed for hosting us and we look forward to working together on this next frontier of public procurement for food system change.

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