Hubs and Markets Working Group

A six-week collective-buying pilot run last summer through a network of local delivery programmes, buying organic produce together through a single wholesaler, worked out roughly £30 per organisation cheaper than each buying separately through its usual supplier — and closer to £250 per organisation cheaper than buying the organic equivalent of the same shopping list at standard retail. Small scale, but a real, measured number rather than a projection — worth using directly in funding cases as proof that collective buying can make organic genuinely cost-competitive, not only values-aligned.

Produce frequently becomes surplus for failing supermarket size or appearance standards, or for being a couple of weeks early or late — not because it is close to spoiling. That creates a genuine tension for community food organisations: waiting an extra day for a cheaper surplus batch is better for a tight budget, but the food is a day older, a day less nutritious, and a day lower quality by the time it reaches someone. Worth naming explicitly rather than treating all surplus as equally fresh.

One idea raised independently: a hub built with the right governance and operating structure could serve both markets from the same infrastructure — supplying nutrient-dense, shock-resistant organic produce on one side, and handling surplus redistribution on the other — rather than treating them as two separate systems that happen to share a warehouse. Nobody has built this yet. Worth holding as an open design question for this group rather than assuming the two have to stay apart.

A large pool of recurring community-food spend already exists across grant-funded meal and holiday-activity programmes, typically re-tendered every three years or less — and almost none of the current contracts specify anything about sourcing, freshness or nutritional standards. Each renewal is a real opportunity to write new conditions in without needing new money. Continental European precedent shows procurement contracts can require delivery of ecological outcomes — soil health, water management — alongside the food itself, which structurally favours organic and regenerative suppliers without naming one directly, which contract law otherwise prohibits.

A past programme incubating regional wholesale food hubs found the single biggest practical barrier wasn’t funding or values alignment — it was that many mission-driven suppliers running hubs lacked an entrepreneurial or commercial operating background, and struggled to run a hub as a business rather than a project. The same logic is already shaping how Camden and Islington are approaching the operator search for their proposed Regis Road hub: prioritising an organisation that can actually run a hub at pace, even where that means the largest existing volume supplier isn’t the right fit to operate it.

The Camden food hub plans to use its own application process as leverage: an organisation only qualifies to receive hub-distributed food if it also meets a minimum service standard — wraparound support such as welfare advice or employment help, not food provision alone. It is a deliberate use of access to a new food source to raise the floor across an entire network of community organisations, rather than simply adding a new supply channel alongside the same providers as before.

A national research project is currently under way asking specifically what it would take to get more UK-grown agroecological produce into non-emergency community food settings — food clubs and social supermarkets, rather than emergency food banks. It is producing financial modelling and a toolkit for smaller suppliers entering public procurement, and plans to use the Camden food hub as a live case study once an operator is appointed. Worth an active connection rather than parallel, duplicated work.

Over the summer, Welsh farmers were commissioned to grow veg specifically for Birmingham community projects; produce reached the hub, and organisations across the city, within a day or two of picking — used explicitly as a live demonstration of what a shortened, fresher supply chain can look like in practice, not just a concept. The plan is to repeat it around December and Easter, funding allowing.

The Birmingham hub is piloting a bulk-buying offer for partner organisations — produce bought and passed on well below retail (potatoes cited at roughly a third of supermarket price), and a wholesale buying service run for a handling fee rather than a profit margin. A second, independent confirmation of a finding already on this page: the presenter named the same barrier as the "Social value is real, and almost impossible to price" finding above — a proper Social Return on Investment study is effectively out of reach without funding a university partner directly (cited at roughly £25k), leaving impact evidenced mostly by volume and portion counts instead.

Isabel, from Sustain, described their National Lottery Climate Action Fund concept in more detail than before: bringing together community groups, public-sector institutions and retailers within a place to coordinate purchasing power and meaningfully shift supply chains — still at an early, first-stage bid. A genuinely useful, concrete constraint named directly: the funder is reluctant to fund infrastructure itself, and wary of anything that reads as short-term (vouchers, surplus-food handling) unless it's clearly tied to a longer-term systemic goal. Worth designing future funding asks around explicitly. Sustain is also expanding capacity to focus on schools and broader public-sector procurement, and is exploring support for sub-regional borough groupings beyond individual boroughs working alone — a South-East London group already meets on food.

Sustain has published a new report on food resilience in London with London Resilience and the GLA, which has secured funding to establish a food-focused partnership group sitting inside London's civil-emergency planning structure — reportedly the first time a body at that level has had an explicit food focus, and described as the only regional/mayoral-authority structure of its kind currently doing this. The stated intention is to feed grassroots and lived-experience input into it, and to share what it learns back out to groups like this working group. This lands directly on top of the portfolio's own "Local Food Resilience Committee" push — worth actively connecting to rather than treating as a separate initiative.

Adam, from Dark Matter Labs, argued for calculating and presenting the cost of inaction directly to national government — pointing to COVID as the precedent for governments waiting until forced to act — timed to a window of roughly the next 12–18 months. The case rests on two compounding shocks arriving close together: a severe food shock this winter, and a labour-market shock over a similar timeframe, partly AI-driven. The argument: any infrastructure invested in now should be judged on whether it helps withstand both, not just one. Also restated Dark Matter Labs' own track record as mostly Nordic and pan-European (citing work across roughly 100 cities through the EU's Net Zero Cities programme) and its role here as a background convenor running an open-IP policy, not a delivery organisation.

A direct question from the floor: how do food-systems-focused organisations and food-poverty/food-bank-focused organisations, who can feel like they're speaking different languages, work as one group. The proposed answer, from both Dark Matter Labs and Sustain: treat it as complementary specialisation, not a conflict — align upstream around one shared theory of change (nutrient-dense food, shortened supply chains, collective buying benefiting the whole system), while accepting each organisation plays a different downstream role. Sustain pointed to an existing national sector-coalition effort doing exactly this — several anti-poverty and food-systems organisations agreeing shared core asks for government, while keeping their own specialisms.

Asked directly how these hubs actually get set up, Damien Conrad answered from Felix Project's own operating experience: food arrives centrally by articulated lorry and leaves by transit van, and the further a depot sits from the frontline, the longer and more expensive that final-mile leg becomes. Local hubs shorten that leg, free up capacity at the central depot, and let a borough target hub placement strategically at need and deprivation rather than depot convenience. The binding constraint in practice is very rarely food supply — Felix Project currently has close to 1,000 organisations on a waiting list for food aid — it's logistics labour: drivers and vans.

Hackney's working figure — roughly £32,000 in combined food spend across 20 community organisations — if replicated across London's boroughs, implies well over £1m in community-food and better-food-trader spend that could in principle be pooled. That's before touching the larger institutional procurement this group is also chasing.

Better Food Traders is working with the Food Foundation to quantify how much London's community and food projects actually spend, specifically to test whether that collective spending power can be redirected toward UK farms. They're already linked to Growing Communities — 23 organic farms from Kent through Scotland — and the Better Food Shed, which aggregates that produce into London veg-box schemes. Both organisations see this work as a possible large-scale expansion of their own operation, not just a funding exercise.

Newham is pursuing a National Lottery Climate Action Fund bid built around a nonprofit "circular agriculture hub" — a broker entity set up by academics from Bristol and Nottingham universities to purchase food from farms on institutions' behalf. The emerging model: Newham buys on behalf of its own schools, that money flows to Growing Communities' farms, and Street Box aggregates and delivers the food into around 50 Newham schools. It's still in discovery phase, and deliberately separate from the consolidated bid this group is coordinating through Sustain — the same logic as item 09 below, kept distinct so neither effort spreads itself too thin or accidentally undercuts the other.

Kingston has just set up a hub. Haringey and Waltham Forest — both Green-led councils with food commitments in their manifestos — border each other around Manor House, a high-deprivation area that makes a natural case for pooling resources rather than each building alone. Redbridge and Havering looked at hub feasibility already and found it too costly for the number of people it would reach at their scale; the working advice is to talk to Barking & Dagenham directly about consolidating van routes instead of building a second small hub nearby. Lewisham has also expressed interest, after its mayor connected with someone at Labour Party conference — Felix Project is introducing that conversation through a colleague.

A genuinely useful correction: farmers already have access to a shared digital logistics network that lets them book pallet space on existing trucking routes, transparently and at scale — this group doesn't need to invent a new matching system from scratch, just connect to what's already running. Felix's own experience backs this up at the depot level: a straightforward route review cut one round from three hours to thirty minutes, and a later AI-assisted pass shaved a further 25% off total routes. The harder problem wasn't the technology — it was holding agency drivers to the new, faster standard once the routes changed.

A report with around 150 signatories makes much the same infrastructure argument as this group — Felix isn't currently a signatory, which Damien flagged as worth fixing. Sustain and the Greenwich Community Development Association have completed a community-resilience report for the Mayor, mapping community food assets and recommending logistical, infrastructural and operational support for them. And a food-systems researcher — formerly at Cranfield University and UK Research and Innovation, now at the University of Glasgow — has a small research fund and wants to trace exactly where food is lost between farm and market: on the farm, in the packhouse, to climate stress, to supermarkets reneging on contracts, or to cosmetic out-grading, and how much of that reaches charity food aid versus anaerobic digestion or landfill. A genuine opportunity to put a real evidence base under claims this group currently makes qualitatively.

Food Foundation and Veg Power's "Bang in Some Beans" campaign got major retailers, the NFU and the AHDB to jointly commit to doubling UK bean consumption by 2028 — a real example of coordinated demand-side commitment unlocking supply-side investment, which is exactly the mechanism this group is trying to build for other crops. Separately, a land-matching movement is growing across the UK, connecting people who own underused land with people who want to grow food — including a precedent in Powys, where relaxed planning rules let young farmers live on the council-owned land they farm. And one stark illustration of why farm economics need fixing: a Kent orchard grower was running at a loss on his apple crop — picking costs exceeded the 30p/kg contract price, with 60–70% of fruit rejected on cosmetic grounds — until Sustainable Farming Incentive payments turned the same land into a viable income. The sharp edge is that every apple he actually picks and sells currently erodes that SFI income, because harvesting still costs more than the fruit is worth under the existing contract. The Soil Association's "Good Food Scotland" work, linking farms directly to schools and council procurement at small scale, is a live precedent worth examining directly.