St Ives Community Foodshare

Saving food from landfill to share with our community.
St Ives Community Foodshare

St Ives Community Foodshare rescues good food from supermarkets and other sources every single day and redistributes the food in many ways. We offer 6 collections of free food every week and often cook up food for the community to enjoy in social settings.

Reducing Waste
Supermarkets, farms & bakeries throw away huge amounts of food for various reasons. Think of all the time, money, resources & energy it takes to get this food to our supermarkets. Food in landfill produces methane, a greenhouse gas up to 50x more potent than CO2. We save this food from going to waste, and therefore reduce pollution in the environment.

Reducing Food Insecurity & hunger
Due to rising costs, many people are struggling to afford essential food for themselves and their families.  Foodshare aims to support those in need by offering free food six days a week. We regularly provide a good selection of fruits and vegetables which helps people maintain a healthy diet. Everyone is welcome to collect this free food, whether for themselves or for someone else who might need it. By reducing food insecurity, we hope to foster a stronger, healthier community.

Volunteer with us

Free Food Collections

You can find St Ives Community Foodshare in these different locations:

The collection lasts between 15min and half an hour.

Anybody is welcome to collect free food, if not for yourself, then for someone else who might need it

We don’t have a traditional queuing system. Just rock up and everyone who arrives on time picks a spoon with a number to determine their space in the queue. This means there is no need to queue or come early. Those who arrive after the set time queue as normal. We are usually finished in 15 to 20 minutes.

More about Foodshare and how we work

st ives community foodshare

The St Ives Community Foodshare group was set up in March 2020 to save food from going to waste. A non-profit community group who collects food that would otherwise be thrown away.

A registered food business with a 5-star rating.

Volunteers go down to the 3 Co-ops after 9.15pm every night of the week, as well collecting a day or 2 from ASDA, Tesco and Sainsbury’s and local restaurants and bakeries. They take all food back to their storage room full of fridges and freezers at St Ives Rugby Club. The amount of food varies greatly and food is weighed to keep a record of food that is saved from landfill.

At the Rugby club, volunteers sort all the ‘best before’ food for collection the following day. All items that are labelled ‘Use-by’ and can be frozen & re-heated like pizza, pies, ready meals, milk, chopped veg are put into a glass fronted freezer ready to be collected.
Meat is stored in another freezer, clearly labelled with how long it can remain frozen before re-use based on it’s freezing instructions. This meat is used by chefs to cook up meals for deliveries and at community meals. When it gets close to the expired freezing date, it is transferred to the glass-fronted freezer for collection.

Some use-by food like sandwiches, yoghurts can’t be frozen or given out the next day due to food safety laws. This food is given out the same night to local families that can make use of these items, usually larger families that need this additional support.

St Ives Community Foodshare has signed up with Co-op foodshare programme which allowed volunteers to collect food from St Ives 3 local Co-op’s every single evening. Also  Fareshare who connects them with Tesco and Asda and Neighbourly who connect us with  Sainsbury.

Pengenna, The Cornish Bakery and Warrens Bakery in St Ives give us their surplus pasties.

The Western Hotel give us leftover Sunday lunch which gets packed up in takeaway containers for collection at Mike Peters Estate on Mondays

Cornwall Gleaning Network regularly bring us a huge amount of wonderful vegetables from the fields. Read more about gleaning below.

Gleaning

We are incredibly grateful to the Gleaning Cornwall team for their regular supply of fresh, nutritious produce.

Visit Cornwall Gleaning Network  for more info.

Gleaning is the act of collecting leftover crops from farmers’ fields after they have been commercially harvested or on fields where it is not economically profitable to harvest. It can also involve going into gardens or orchards and collecting fruit that would otherwise just fall onto the ground. It is actually an age-old European tradition from the middle ages where farmers would invite the poor onto their land to collect the unharvested produce.

When we get the opportunity, we glean vegetables from nearby farms. Splattenridden & Trowan farm have allowed us to come and pick their vegetables a few times