The rise of the community supermarket
Food banks are currently the only mainstream answer to the problem of food poverty in the UK, and their numbers have exploded in recent years. Yet they are not an ideal solution; food banks are only able to supply short-term emergency food packages, and can usually only offer assistance to people who have been referred to them in advance.
They are also associated by many people with hand-outs, and feelings of shame and disempowerment. There is a clear need to explore alternative models for delivering affordable food to families and individuals struggling to put food on the table.
The concept of the ‘community supermarket’ is only just beginning to take hold in the UK, but elsewhere in the world, community supermarkets are found more widely. These are (usually) not for profit food retail outlets, selling produce at below-market prices by making use of volunteers, bulk buying or selling off surplus from larger retailers and co-operative or mutual financing models to keep prices down.
There are only a handful of examples in the UK at present – all using slightly different variants of the community supermarket model and with slightly different aims, which also encompass reducing food waste, community regeneration and encouraging healthy eating.
METHODOLOGY
Through this project, Demos will gather together the various existing approaches to tackling food poverty, both internationally and in the UK, and review their lessons for good practice and implementation. The project will use a combination of desk research and phone interviews to review existing community supermarket models across Europe, the US, Canada and Australia. Demos will then place these models within a broad framework of different approaches, allowing us to compare and contrast them, assessing their pros and cons, and their applicability to a UK context.
The end result of this process will be a workshop guide for organisations interested in piloting community supermarkets in the UK, in addition to a written report presenting our findings. We hope that this process will allow policymakers and charities to adopt a more nuanced and diverse approach to tackling food poverty in a sustainable manner.
If you have any suggestions for existing community supermarket schemes that should be included within our review – either in the UK or elsewhere – please get in touch with jo.salter@demos.co.uk
This research is supported by a grant from the Esmee Fairbairn Foundation.