Draft, shared for early review. A partner workstream with the Hackney Food Hub group.
An overview for everyone working on Hackney's food hub
A group of Hackney council officers, community food organisations and independent traders has been meeting to work out how the borough's food groups could buy, store and share food collectively, backed by shared infrastructure rather than each organisation fending for itself. This page is a single place to see what that's for, how it connects to work already happening across London, and how it stays coordinated as it develops.
This isn't only about finding a warehouse. It's about building something that does all four of these together — the same test the wider Food as Infrastructure portfolio holds every idea to.
Hackney's food organisations currently buy separately, mostly at standard retail prices. Buying together — even at small scale — makes better food genuinely affordable, not just a values choice.
The ambition is a collective food co-op: shared storage and buying power that Hackney's community organisations own and direct, not a service delivered to them from outside.
Shared storage and shared supplier relationships mean no single organisation's food access depends on one contract, one van, or one good year.
The point isn't only to move surplus food more efficiently. It's to build lasting organising and logistics capacity — a foundation to grow from over years, not a one-off pandemic-style response.
Nobody is claiming to have this solved. The value of the group so far has been in comparing notes honestly — including admitting where it's stuck.
Based in strategy, equalities and community partnerships, with a background in poverty reduction. A new administration has signalled a fresh food strategy, giving this work more explicit mandate — looked at alongside the borough's wider economic development strategy, including how it could support small, independent local food shops, not only community groups.
Includes an established local food cooperative, an independent grocer already trusted by community organisations across Hackney and neighbouring Haringey, and a local food bank whose interest goes beyond food itself — toward helping organisations offer people a way out of poverty, not just a handout.
The Food Network is the grassroots, community-facing coordination body, running since the pandemic. The Food Partnership is a separate, more policy-focused body — dormant for several years — now relaunching to bring together organisations working on different parts of the food system.
Felix Project has been working with at least ten boroughs already building or exploring a hub, coordinating the Hubs & Markets Working Group to share best practice and encourage collaboration instead of separate funding bids. That's led to Sustain building a consortium and sharing their National Lottery bid with boroughs, asking for expressions of interest.
Focused beyond hubs and civic infrastructure alone — on the collective buying power of London as a whole, including larger procurement and business purchases — and building a wider portfolio of work around that focus.
Hackney is the newest borough working through this — but four others have already built, or are building, a version of the same thing. This effort sits inside a much larger, already-moving picture.
The wider group Hackney is now part of — spanning most of north and east London, comparing real hubs in Lambeth, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Camden + Islington.
The fuller working note: what's already been found, mapped directly onto what other boroughs learned, and the concrete next steps.
The wider argument this work sits inside — six different levers for moving London's buying power behind organic, resilient, civic-led food.
The full, London-wide portfolio this workstream is one part of — councils, national government and people on the ground building on the same foundations.
The group has needed a greater level of coordination at times. These are the mechanisms meant to build that.
A working session set specifically to bring clarity: rather than wait for a lead to be confirmed, the group agreed one concrete first move everyone could act on immediately — see below.
Calling round every Hackney community food organisation directly to find out real monthly food spend — a written survey tried this earlier and got almost no responses. Building the relationship and collecting the number at the same time.
Hackney now sits inside a wider, regularly-meeting group comparing real hub examples across boroughs — so lessons travel both ways, not just from Hackney out.
See the working group's own work-ahead listA shared library of hub proposals, capacity models and go-live plans from every borough already building one — the first place to look before designing something from scratch.
Council teams looking for hub or storage space are now logging it in one place — now covering a grocer's warehouse, a resident's garden storage, an unused car park and a Haringey industrial unit — so different parts of the council stop independently approaching the same landlords.
Mirroring the experiential "Future Food Dinner" format already run in Camden, to give councillors and senior leaders a shared, felt sense of what's possible — and build the political headroom this work needs to move.
As the group's next monthly session (provisionally 12 October) and what follows produce real decisions, both this overview and the more detailed state-of-play note get updated — so anyone joining later doesn't start from zero either.
Read the detailed working note
