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Food waste group's allotment aims to boost produce

Jack Hadaway-Wellerin Sharrow, Sheffield
News imageJack Hadaway-Weller/BBC A man in an orange T-shirt ad green trousers stands in front of a group of people in a kitchen. The kitchen is adorned with paper cut outs of vegetables. On the counter tops is fruit as well as some cakes.Jack Hadaway-Weller/BBC
Food Works Sheffield, previously known as The Real Junk Food Project, has been active for 11 years

A social enterprise dedicated to tackling food waste and improving access to affordable and healthy meals is to open a new allotment to help stock its cafes and distribute food to the local community.

Food Works Sheffield currently gets most of its stock directly from firms which want to cut their food waste, but it also plans to start growing its own vegetables at a new site in Crosspool.

Produce grown there would also be used as ingredients in its frozen ready meals, which are supplied to food banks and hospitals.

CEO René Meijer said: "It can grow a lot of food that can be harvested both for the local community, but also to provide healthy, local, fresh vegetables to go into our meals."

"Our kitchens produce hundreds of meals every day. Some of those go out to our cafes, but quite a big part of those are frozen as ready meals," Meijer explained.

News imageJack Hadaway-Weller/BBC A rack of bread and vegetables inside a room. There are also a number of jars and cans in the rack.Jack Hadaway-Weller/BBC
The group also runs small food markets inside its two cafe sites

Food Works currently operates two community cafes in Sharrow and Upperthorpe where meals are sold for a £2.50 or less and are made from surplus food which would otherwise have gone to waste.

In 2024, the group began growing seedlings inside derelict greenhouses in Graves Park at the former Norton Nurseries site, and those are then distributed to schools and growing projects.

The new garden, on Carver Fields, is close to the site of a new storm overflow tank which is being built by Yorkshire Water.

Meijer said: "For us, the new site will be about complementing what we already get in - so, things like potatoes or bananas or carrots, they go surplus quite a lot.

"Other things, like beans or other legumes we don't get that much of, like onions or garlic, because they go into every meal and you can never have enough of them."

Food Works, which was previously known as The Real Junk Food Project, celebrated its 10th anniversary last year.

To mark the milestone, the enterprise launched a commemorative book alongside a crowdfunding appeal to support its publication and future initiatives.

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