Food Rescue

Devon County Council is delivering the National Lottery funded 'Food Rescue' project which will work with communities to rescue and redistribute surplus food to individuals, households and groups in order to reduce food waste, feed people and build community capacity and resilience.

Community Fridges are the key element of Food Rescue. They are publicly accessible spaces that allow excess food from across the supply chain to be given away for free in order to prevent the food becoming waste. There are over 250 Community Fridges already operating across the UK.

Most of the food that ends up in Community Fridges comes from businesses and is surplus to requirements – for reasons from cancelled events to the wrong kind of weather – for example, supermarkets sell more salad when the sun is shining! However, Community Fridges can also take food from households, whether that’s home-grown / allotment gluts or if something isn’t going to get eaten in time due to a change of plan.

Food Rescue plans to set up 10 Community Fridges across Devon.  In addition, Food Rescue will develop gleaning opportunities across Devon – enabling volunteers to harvest on-farm surplus crops for onwards redistribution.  The project will also grow the use of the free food sharing app, Olio, and run local community cooking events to promote the fridges showcasing easy recipes to reduce food waste.

DCT's Role

As a delivery partner, DCT is:

• Undertaking overall Social Impact Evaluation of the project.
• As a member, contributing to strategic decisions and activities of the Devon Food Partnership. 

How to get involved

Anyone interested in finding out more about the project or getting involved can email foodrescue@recycledevon.org