How to build a sustainable food enterprise and battle food poverty with The Larder podcast
The Larder is a social enterprise in Preston that aims to tackle food poverty and promote food sustainability through ‘thinking globally, acting locally.’
Through its initiatives, The Larder empowers local communities, enabling food access, educating and providing work in sustainable food. These projects are designed to encourage people to ask questions about where their food comes from and create a demand for more sustainable food systems.
In this episode, we talk with Kay Johnson about how The Larder was formed, it’s various projects and how these have been impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. We also look into the benefits of The Larder’s initiatives and other such social enterprises on the local economy, and discuss the role that researchers can play in co-creating research alongside non-academic organisations to produce evidence that is useful in supporting these communities and developing scalable models to replicate their results on the global scale.
Speaker profiles
The Larder is a social enterprise based in Preston promoting food that is healthy, local, seasonal, and low waste. They work through their cafe and catering business, food academy and network of Lancashire farmers and producers.
Kay Johnson is The Larder’s founder and has worked for more than 20 years as a nutritionist managing food poverty initiatives nationally and overseas. Kay believes in Food Fairness for All and is most recently doing a PhD which will explore how fresh local produce can be made affordable to people on low incomes without farmers, producers, animals and the environment bearing the cost.
- We outline what The Larder is and its origins, its goals, and how it sets out to achieve these through its different initiatives
- What the benefits are of The Larder’s procurement model for local businesses
- How the Preston model, focusing on shared wealth and ownership, benefits local communities, and how The Larder fits into this strategy
- How researchers can better collaborate with communities such as The Larder
- The impact of Covid-19 on how The Larder is delivering its projects.