Northampton Town FC Community Trust announced as one of six winners of Hubbub's Eat It Up Fund

Six projects have been awarded £40,000 each to develop their creative solutions to tackling food waste, including Northampton Town FC Community Trust's Cobblers Tackle Food Waste project.

Environmental charity Hubbub has today announced the winners of its Eat It Up Fund, designed to find creative solutions to tackling food waste.

Launched in July, the Eat It Up Fund called on small businesses, social enterprises, charities, local authorities and universities to come forward with innovative ideas that address food waste. The fund set out to fund a range of initiatives that target waste on farms, at manufacturing stage, from retailers and in people’s homes.

The fund is being supported by the Starbucks 5p cup charge which is applied each time a customer chooses to use a single-use cup. Six winners have been awarded grants of up to £40,000 to develop their ideas over the next 12 months, with support from Hubbub:

Northampton Town FC Community Trust: Cobblers Tackle Food Waste

Using the power of football, this community campaign will inspire families in Northamptonshire to tackle food waste. With Final Third and Planet League they’ll offer a gamified experience, setting football fans and their friends and families challenges from turning their leftovers into delicious new meals to transforming vegetable peelings into crisps. A series of fun workshops will further amplify the campaign and bring the whole community together to bring food waste right down.

Natural Resources Institute (NRI), University of Greenwich

The NRI aims to upcycle brewer’s spent grain (BSG) via an industry partnership to create a meat alternative burger prototype. The project, led by Dr Parag Acharya and Dr Micael De Andrade Lima, combines shelf-life studies and eco-innovative extraction of BSG protein to formulate a plant-based meat analogue, making it a comprehensive approach to addressing food waste and sustainable food production.

The Hornbeam Centre

The Hornbeam Centre will rescue surplus food from farmers in East Anglia and South-East England, distributing it to food cooperatives, pantries, and other mutual-aid initiatives across Waltham Forest. With project partners The Better Food Shed and Organic Lea, they will connect farmers with five local groups to develop a redistribution model to support people at risk of experiencing food poverty.

Tom's Feast: Forgotten Feast

Headed up by eco-chef, food writer and food waste campaigner Tom Hunt, Tom’s Feast will develop an ice cream from surplus fruit, veg and dairy under the name ‘Forgotten Feast’. Innovative sourcing and inventive flavours using commonly wasted food items will mean tastebuds are tickled and awareness is raised.

Sow the City: Grounds to Grow

Manchester based social enterprise Sow the City will team up with Starbucks stores to collect waste coffee grounds, to cultivate mushrooms in. The oyster mushrooms they harvest will be packaged and distributed by e-bike for sale and to Hubbub’s Community Fridge Network. Spent mushroom blocks will then be re-purposed as soil conditioner and re-distributed to Sow the City’s community garden network.

The Wonki Collective

Food waste costs UK food manufacturers £6.7bn annually whilst unnecessarily emitting 2.4m tonnes of greenhouse gases. The Wonki Collective is on a mission to stop supply chain waste. They have pioneered the first business-to-business matchmaking technology to enable food and drink manufacturers to efficiently identify and sell surplus ingredients. This funding will allow them to advance their technology whilst supporting more manufacturers to identify surplus as early as possible to maximise nutritional and commercial value.

Mark Breen, Senior Creative Partner at Hubbub said: “It’s been so inspiring to see the entries for the Eat It Up Fund – so much so that we awarded six projects with funding rather than five. Each of these projects is so unique and we are looking forward to seeing how each initiative develops. We hope that these creative solutions will inspire others to think about what they can do to accelerate the movement to tackle food waste”

According to WRAP, 10.7 million tonnes of food is wasted each year in the UK by households, hospitality & food services, food manufacturers, retailers and the farm sector.

For more information on the Eat It Up Fund, and for more details on each of the winning projects, visit eatitupfund.org.uk.