October update

To inspire more food redistribution within Bristol, the Food Redistribution Tool on the Bristol Good Food website is available to help food businesses understand which organisations can help them reallocate their food to those who will use it. This tool has been developed by Bristol’s Food Redistribution Group, a Working Group for organisations who redistribute food in and around Bristol, chaired by environmental consultancy Resource Futures.

The following progress on Action Plans related to food waste was noted at the Infrastructure Working Group meeting in September. 

• Fareshare SouthWest is able to relabel and repackage food: limited progress on relabelling and repackaging. Some relabelling is happening but there are concerns about controls to ensure allergen information is consistent which is restricting developments. Repackaging is not possible within the existing facility space – the ‘clean room’ needed for this could be part of a move to larger facilities. Investment has now been made in labelling equipment. Fareshare is making infrastructural improvements allowing them to freeze more and process more in-house. FareShare Southwest is investing in freezer capacity to help mitigate the surplus food issues. The development and expansion of a facility to enable the storage and distribution of frozen food was completed end of July 2023. However, the availability of surplus food is not keeping up with demand.
   
  
• Wild Goose Café has applied for a grant from the Household Support Fund via Feeding Bristol to improve long-term resilience to providing healthy balanced meals and reducing food waste. This was approved, but Wild Goose is still waiting for the funds to come through in order to purchase the blast chiller. 15-20kg of surplus food is being shared with a local church, alongside checking they are aware of shelf life, information regarding allergens, pre-packaging and safety in line with Natasha’s Law. Food waste has been reduced at the café from an average of 7.5kg a day (with the majority of that being the makeup of the meals, for example potato peelings) to about 5kg.
   
• Bountiful Bristol (BB) continues to redistribute allotment surplus, expanding the project into East Bristol. BB is continuing to redistribute food from the four allotment sites set up as ‘grow it forward’ partnerships in 2022 – currently applying for funding to be able to expand this to 14 ‘grow it forward’ partnerships and run a number of workshops to connect and inspire allotment members to donate.
   
• Wessex Water is interested in co-funding a PhD project to look at the socio-cultural factors involved with food waste, with an aim to better develop campaigns and actions to reduce food waste. If anyone from Bristol Good Food 2030 is interested in being involved, it would be great to hear from them.  

• The action on the Avon Gleaning Network and Fareshare SouthWest collaboration with RaviOllie to turn gleaned vegetables into dishes that charities can use needs progress.