Community food enterprises

Ask what a community food enterprise is and the answer is usually a list: a café in a church hall that trains young people as it feeds pensioners, a van that sells fruit and vegetables at close to cost on estates the supermarkets ignore, a market garden on a vacant lot, a depot that collects surplus stock from retailers and passes it to lunch clubs. What they share is that they trade, they reinvest what they make, and they exist because the ordinary food system is failing someone.

The field is growing. The 2017 Social Enterprise in Scotland Census found that food, catering and hospitality had the largest relative growth in new social enterprises of any sector in the two years since the first census in 2015. Some of that is cafés, which are a natural first trade for a community organisation with a building. Some of it is a response to rising food insecurity, which has pushed community groups into feeding people and then into asking how to do it with more dignity than a parcel.

Cafés and kitchens

The community café is the most common form. It gives a centre something to sell, a reason for people to come through the door and a place to offer training or volunteering to people a long way from the job market. The economics are hard. Margins on food are thin, and a café that is also a training kitchen will never run as fast as a commercial one. Most survive on a mix of takings, contracts and grants, and the honest ones say so.

Selling good food where it is scarce

Food co-ops and community shops try to fix the supply side. Locavore, a community interest company in Govanhill on the south side of Glasgow, started in 2011 with the aim of building a local food economy for the city. It runs a grocery and café on Victoria Road, delivers organic vegetable boxes across west central Scotland and grows much of its produce on urban plots and a market garden of its own, with cooking and growing sessions for local people alongside.

Community Food Initiatives North East, known as CFINE, has been working in Aberdeen since 1997. It trades in fruit, vegetables and healthy snacks, selling wholesale and retail across the city and Aberdeenshire, and uses the income to support community food outlets, cookery training and growing projects. It is a charity and a social enterprise at once, a combination common in this field.

Surplus food

Food waste has become the other front. FareShare, the national surplus food charity, works in Scotland through regional centres run by local partners. CFINE runs FareShare Grampian, taking in-date surplus food from producers and retailers and passing it to charities and community groups that turn it into meals. In Edinburgh the homelessness charity Cyrenians runs the FareShare depot in Leith, supplying community organisations across central and south east Scotland, and uses some of the food in community cook clubs. In January 2019 the Scottish Government added £500,000 to its support for FareShare in Scotland, doubling its investment, partly as a precaution against Brexit disrupting food supplies.

Surplus food schemes have critics. They ask whether routing supermarket waste to people on low incomes treats hunger as a disposal problem. The better projects take the point and use surplus as one ingredient among several, alongside food bought and grown.

Growing

Community growing is where policy has moved furthest. Part 9 of the Community Empowerment (Scotland) Act 2015 came into force on 1 April 2018. It updates the law on allotments and requires every local authority to publish a food-growing strategy, identifying land that could be used for community growing, by 1 April 2020. The Scottish Government’s statutory guidance on the duty sets out what councils must consider. For community gardens that have spent years on short leases and goodwill, this is the first time the law has asked councils to plan for them.

A food nation

The larger question is whether all this effort adds up to a food policy. The Scottish Government’s consultation on legislation to make Scotland a Good Food Nation closed on 18 April, and campaigners, community food organisations among them, have pressed for the promised law to include a statutory right to food. Community food enterprises have an obvious stake in the answer. They are among the few bodies that deal every day with both ends of the problem: people who cannot afford to eat well, and food that goes to waste.

Since then, Locavore expanded to four shops and then entered administration in January 2024, with its Govanhill and Partick stores and vegetable box business sold to another community interest company.