Hackney doesn’t have to start from zero.
Four other boroughs have already built, or are building, a version of what Hackney is now working out from scratch. This page holds the honest state of Hackney’s own effort, checked directly against what the rest of this working group already learned the hard way — and sets out the concrete next steps, not another open-ended conversation.
Where Hackney is right now
The group's structuring session was candid about this: rather than wait for a lead to be appointed, it agreed one concrete first move everyone could act on immediately. That's a clearer starting point than pretending there's already a plan.
Hackney's own ambition is a collective food co-op: a way for the borough's community food groups to buy, store and share food together, backed by a dedicated hub and space. It grew out of the same question the rest of this group is asking — how does a borough support many small, independent community food efforts as one collective, rather than each fending for itself.
What's missing isn't ambition or goodwill. It's a lead. No single organisation has been asked, or has stepped up, to actually drive it — said openly in the room, not glossed over. Rather than let that stall things, the group agreed a first move everyone can act on now: calling round every Hackney community food organisation directly to find out what they actually spend on food each month. A written survey tried this earlier and got almost no responses; picking up the phone, building the relationship at the same time as collecting the number, is the agreed replacement. Dark Matter Labs has offered to help convene and structure the process; the decision about who actually leads, and who does the buying, stays with the organisations doing the work.
One concrete option already exists: an independent grocer in Stamford Hill, already trusted by community organisations in both Hackney and neighbouring Haringey, has ambient warehouse space available — now indicated at up to around nine pallets — and is open to hosting a small collective-buying pilot. The real gap isn't the space; it's the practical labour of sorting and delivery, which needs dedicated support to set up properly. Two smaller options have also surfaced: a resident's garden with room for a storage container, and an unused underground car park at a site earmarked for future development, plus an interested charity-run industrial unit just across the border in Haringey.
The search for a larger, dedicated hub site is separately underway and separately stalled. No suitable council-owned site has been identified yet, and several candidate sites fail on a basic constraint: no room for an articulated lorry to access or turn without blocking the surrounding road. A council-run community hall was raised too, but comes with its own access complications and sits with a separate team. Officers are keeping a shared log and reaching out across council departments, without a firm result so far. A separate, still-open question: whether collective buying needs its own legal entity, or can run through an existing organisation's structure and cash flow.
What every other hub already found
None of Hackney's open questions are new to this group. Here's what the rest of the working group already learned that speaks directly to where Hackney needs more coordination.
Camden + Islington's hub runs on one accountable operator, not a committee
The Regis Road hub works because a single commercial wholesaler operates it day to day, co-located with the redistribution partner, while the boroughs provide investment rather than run it themselves — a maximum of £400,000 over two years, on the expectation the hub becomes financially independent after that, for around 15 tonnes of food a week (roughly £1.5m/year in value) reaching an estimated 50 organisations with substantial new volume. The group's own "Learning from outside the room" findings go further: hub failure risk sits in operator skillset, not good intentions — a past programme incubating regional hubs found many well-intentioned suppliers simply lacked the commercial background to run one as a business.
The lesson to carry over: Hackney's structuring session should treat "who operates this" as the first decision, not a detail to settle later — and the answer doesn't have to be a new organisation built from scratch.
See the full findingTower Hamlets has run for years on a meanwhile site, not a permanent one
Tower Hamlets' hub still doesn't have chilled or frozen capacity — that remains its binding constraint — but it has operated for years on a meanwhile site with a long rent-free term, while longer-term tenure is explored in parallel. Camden + Islington's own hub is a three-year meanwhile site too.
The lesson to carry over: a permanent, purpose-built site isn't the precondition for starting. Hackney's small-scale grocer-warehouse option can begin now, in parallel with the longer site search, not instead of it.
See the hub anatomyA hub doesn't have to choose one market over the other
The group's outside-learning session raised an open design question directly relevant here: a hub built with the right governance could serve both nutrient-dense organic supply and surplus redistribution from the same infrastructure, rather than treating them as separate systems. Newham's hub already shows one version of "more than one job" — it doubles as a public-health distribution point, though the social value that creates is genuinely hard to price for funders.
The lesson to carry over: design the Stamford Hill pilot to be able to hold both a collective-buying model and a surplus-redistribution role, even if it starts doing only one — retrofitting that later is harder than building it in from day one.
See the full findingSpace economics need to be stated plainly, early
At the Camden food hub, the commercial partner pays real (if discounted) rent while the redistribution partner pays nothing for space — not preferential treatment, just a landlord charging different tenants differently. Camden + Islington also show that a co-located commercial wholesaler can absorb much of a hub's running cost, rather than the council carrying all of it.
The lesson to carry over: get clear, early, on what the Stamford Hill grocer is actually being asked to give free versus what he needs paying for — labour and delivery support especially — rather than letting the arrangement default into an assumption either side later resents.
See the full findingNewham's own attempt to push surplus into school catering ran into fixed menus
Newham tried routing surplus food into its school catering system and the chefs simply couldn't use it — menus are set in advance, and there was no built-in flexibility to adapt on short notice. The food was good; the format wasn't ready for it. It's a live warning for any procurement-side ambition, not just Hackney's: institutional catering has to be designed for flexibility from the outset, not asked to absorb it after the fact.
The lesson to carry over: if Hackney's collective-buying work ever reaches school or public-sector catering, build menu flexibility into the agreement itself — don't assume goodwill will bridge a fixed-menu system.
What's next for Hackney
Updated after the group's structuring session. The point of writing them down here is so the next session starts from this list, not from zero.