Charity of the Month: The Feed

We are thrilled to be supporting The Feed as our Charity of the Month for July 2024. Through the power of food, The Feed’s mission is to empower communities in Norwich, ensuring every person has the support to eat well, live well, and feel connected.

A recent report highlighted that Norfolk has the highest rate of malnutrition in England. This comes about for many reasons, but a big one is the cost-of-living crisis which leaves many people unable to afford enough healthy food.

The work that The Feed does is so essential to our communities, and we’re so pleased to be able to support them, helping them to continue the incredible work they’re doing day in, day out.

Whilst most people in our community will be aware of The Feed, having visited their café’s, or seen their delivery vans around the city we wanted to shine a spotlight on what they do, and how they fund the work they’re doing.

In 2022, The Feed set up its Social Supermarket which you can find at the city end of Hall Road. The Social Supermarket was set up to give the Norwich community access to a wide range of affordable groceries to help people eat well despite the increasing cost of living. The Feed works with local producers and suppliers to provide products at a lower cost than many supermarkets (around 60% less) as well as offering fresh fruit and vegetables, bread, bakery items, toiletries, and period products completely free.

After two years of the Social Supermarket, it is now supporting over 5,000 people in Norwich of all ages.

To keep supporting those who need it, the Social Supermarket needs funding. Here’s how they’re doing it…

• Community Café’s - running cafés in the local community allows The Feed to put all of the profit made straight into the Social Supermarket and funding food. We highly recommend visiting their café in Waterloo Park (beautiful location, excellent food!) or their REST café on Bethel Street. They also have a staff bistro at Kettle Foods for their staff and a café at Norwich University of the Arts for NUA staff & students.
• Catering – here at LP we are big fans of The Feed’s catering, using it regularly for internal and client meetings (we highly recommend!) Earlier this year the catering operation moved from its Prince of Wales venue to the Norfolk Showground to expand their offering and meet demand. The catering service offers corporate and event catering, brilliant for everything from breakfasts to grazing boards, lunches, canape’s, and more – do check out The Feed for your next event.
• Fundraising – funding the products the Social Supermarket offers is always a challenge, especially with rising costs for the charity across all elements of the business, so in addition to their cafés and catering generating funds, support from individuals and businesses raising funds for them is so important to raise awareness of the issues The Feed is working to tackle, and to help them to continue to offer their services.

As well as running the Social Supermarket, The Feed runs its neighbouring Community Café – a space for the Social Supermarket community to socialise, learn about food & nutrition, and stay warm in the Winter months, a one-to-one well-being support called ‘Thrive’, a 10-week programme for women to help improve wellbeing and learn new skills called ‘Bloom’ and so much more.

An essential part of our community, The Feed is a fantastic local charity to get behind and support, be that through corporate catering, visiting their café’s or running a marathon to raise funds, do get involved. If you’d like to fundraise for or support The Feed, please do get in touch with Chris Elliott, Marketing Manager at The Feed via chris@thefeed.org.uk, he would love to hear from you.