Sustainable Food Places welcomes five new members and 22 award winners

Sustainable Food Places (SFP), the partnership network led by Sustain, Food Matters and the Soil Association, is celebrating the five new members and 22 new award winners announced this week.

Following a round of brilliant applications, new members Kent, Andover, Hartlepool, Newham and East Ayrshire join SFP’s cohort of nearly 100 food partnerships who are all working on the six key issues in the SFP framework. 

Bronze Award winners include Southwark, Shropshire, Rhondda Cynon Taf, Newry, Mourne & Down, Liverpool, Lewes, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, Eastbourne, Devon, Derry, Carmarthenshire, Blackburn with Darwen, Birmingham and Aberdeenshire.

Sheffield, Plymouth, Oxfordshire, North Lancashire, Leicestershire, Glasgow, and Dumfries & Galloway have been awarded the coveted Silver. 

Leon Ballin, SFP Programme Manager said:

We are delighted to make 22 awards in 2023, which reflects a growing recognition of the Sustainable Food Places awards as a national benchmark of good practice amongst communities, local authorities, and food partnerships. This brings the total of current SFP Award holders in the UK to 50.

Bronze Awards are a recognition of collaborative best practice across the entire food system, while Silver Awards recognise embeddedness and innovation, and the beginnings of a whole place approach. All SFP awards demonstrate how a food partnership is the essential piece of sustainable food infrastructure in a place – whether it be a borough, county, city or district. It is also testament to the food partnership coordinator, team and stakeholders as showing this impact requires considerable skill, knowledge and capacity.

Vera Zakharov, the network's Local Action Coordinator, said:

We were blown away by the level of best practice, leadership and innovation among award winners and new members. These awards demonstrate the calibre of work led by food partnerships on improving access to healthy, climate- and nature-friendly food, transforming local food economies and procurement, and centring community voices and action in transforming local food systems. This is a moment not only to recognise the sheer excellence and power of our network but to reiterate that every local area across the UK deserves to have a thriving food partnership and a guiding food strategy in place.