Record number of places recognised for innovation and leadership on healthy and sustainable food

Sustainable Food Places awards recognise the hard work that goes into promoting healthy, sustainable, and local food that tackles some of today’s greatest social and environmental challenges. The awards are open to any place - cities, boroughs, county or districts - which are members of the Sustainable Food Places Network. Award winners have to demonstrate action across each of the six key-issues of Sustainable Food Places, achieving impact and significant positive change.

Silver award winners:

• Lewisham
• Bury
• Fife
• Torfaen

Bronze award winners:

• Peterborough
• Medway
• Rotherham
• Cumberland
• Cornwall
• Arun & Chichester
• Clackmannanshire
• Belfast
• Swansea
• Nottinghamshire

Examples of action from this round of awards include:

• Introducing auto-enrolment for free school meals, unlocking £1.2 million extra funding, and investing an additional £400,000 to address hunger in secondary schools in the London Borough in Lewisham;
• Investing £240,000 in 14 local food businesses that have innovative ideas for adding value to their produce, diversifying their current operations, and creating new, sustainable food networks and supply chains through their Food Development grant scheme in Torfaen;
• Setting up a Fife-wide procurement group to improve sustainable public procurement across Fife. Members include Fife Council, NHS, Fife College and St Andrews University. They promote ‘meet the producer’ events and started several pilot projects including testing out use of Scotland the Bread flour, a more nutritious organic flour grown locally, in schools and hospitals.

Sustain’s Head of Local Action Sofia Parente says: “In the difficult financial context for local areas, dealing with cost of living and dwindling funding for local government, food partnership awards demonstrate the power of bringing a diversity of stakeholders and perspectives to the table. By joining the dots and bringing together council departments, community and voluntary sector and food businesses to plan and deliver action on food, local areas are testing new approaches, innovating and achieving more with less.”

SFP Programme Manager Leon Ballin says: “All of these places have shown just what can be achieved when committed and creative people work together to make healthy and sustainable food a defining characteristic of where they live. While there is still much to be done, they have helped to set a brilliant benchmark for the rest of the 110+ strong members of our Network to follow. They should all be very proud of themselves for what they are doing to transform our collective food culture and food system for the better.”

Award applications