ALDI CAMBRIDGE

Our vision is for an equitable and regenerative sustainable food system that prioritises fairness for both people and the planet. Through positive action, collaboration, and partnerships grounded in a systems approach, we aim to drive transformative change. We work to: 1. Promote healthy and sustainable food 2. Tackle food insecurity, diet-related ill health and access to affordable healthy food 3. Build community food knowledge, skills, resources and projects 4. Promote a vibrant and diverse sustainable food economy 5. Transform catering and food procurement 6. Reduce food waste and the ecological footprint of the food system

The Edge Café is a community café with a recovery heart; our aim is to provide individuals in recovery from substance misuse a safe and supportive space to meet, connect, develop skills, rebuild lost confidence and generate opportunities for positive change. We provide a visible demonstration of the possibility of recovery from substance misuse and addiction, as the people running the café are all in recovery themselves. We provide a range of arts workshops and wellbeing groups including Mindfulness and Meditation, Pilates and Yoga. Coupled with the work experience and employment we are giving people in recovery, we aim to fill the gap between treatment and becoming employed, productive and empowered citizens. The majority of the volunteers running these workshops are also in recovery. The Edge has also hosted Cambridge's only Community Fridge since 25 September 2017, since then, over 500kg of food that would otherwise have been wasted has been donated to the fridge. Recent research suggests that 61% of the food thrown away in the UK is avoidable and could be eaten if creative ways of sharing are found. The Community Fridge is an attempt to address this issue on a local scale. Anyone can put usable but unwanted food in the fridge, or take it out. The fridge is monitored to make sure nothing is kept past its use-by date. One simply weighs the food and record the exchange.

My partner and I run a Facebook group of 5200+ people where we upload and distribute surplus food from local cafe's/shops and people themselves can upload excess food from their own homes. Please feel free to join our Facebook page to follow our growth, progress or perhaps even come to The Hub and see us! We work with a local preschool which we know through our children to distribute more food around the area in which is resides as it is in a different part of town and therefore opens up to redistribution in another area. We want to expand this to further shops/supermarkets and places to help out local community of Haverhill even more during this cost of living crisis. We operate from Charterhouse Industrial Estate where we have The Hub to enable us to do this in a safer more controlled environment away from our home address so we can focus on the group and increase it beyond it's current capacity with every passing week. We identify people through their locality to Haverhill (surrounding villages included) and their needs are not required to be known as our aim is to save food from going waste, it has the side affect of aiding people within our group too. We do not charge for what we provide however do accept donations towards running costs via a donation bucket and have an Amazon Wishlist for people to purchase items which support the Collections. For us it is about stopping food waste going to landfill and therefore any monetary return to us personally wouldn't sit right with us. We used to collect surplus food and distribute it through the Olio app for Tesco, Iceland and a few other smaller outlets however since January 2023 we have grown from there to use fare share and neighbourly but for us this is only the beginning of something which we want to increase as time goes on. A few Christmas's ago we had an article done on us by a local newspaper, the link for which is below. https://www.suffolknews.co.uk/haverhill/news/scheme-s-food-waste-heroes-help-to-feed-people-in-need-9233684/ We work with our kids preschool (Castlefields) who are part of Neighbourly, to collect from Aldi, lidl, sainsburys, B and Q so that they get all fresh produce/items that can be used within the preschool setting and we distribute what cannot be used there through the Facebook group. This is something that we are keen to continue to do and support. Outside of Neighbourly we also collect from Tesco, Waitrose, Bookers, Co-Op and other smaller shops which have local out reaches.