Sustainable Food Places

Through the power of partnerships, we aim to make healthy and sustainable food a defining characteristic of where people live.

Since 2013, the Sustainable Food Places programme has been the driving force behind the UK’s rapidly growing place-based food partnership movement.

The programme is coordinated by three national food charities — Food Matters, the Soil Association and Sustain. It supports a network of 95 food partnerships, representing 24 million people across the UK.

What is a Sustainable Food Places partnership?

Food partnerships bring together people from across the food system.

This includes local authorities, community and voluntary sector organisations, farmers and local businesses. They develop a shared vision for a more sustainable food future and coordinate the action needed to make it a reality. They use a whole-systems approach to food. This tackles issues such as food poverty, ill-health, agriculture, food security and climate change. They develop cross-sector solutions that are transforming food and farming. Food partnerships are also about people and place. They put local communities at the heart of their work to ensure a fair future for food.

What does Sustainable Food Places do?

Driving, coordinating and delivering change across the whole food system.

• We support local food partnerships to grow and prosper.

• We provide a framework for systems level change.

• We connect stakeholders across a disparate national food system.

• We put communities at the heart of local food decision-making.

• We facilitate peer-to-peer learning and knowledge exchange.

• We drive change at a strategic and policy level.

• We fuel the growth of a nation wide good food movement.

"Food is a measure of how well or how badly we are doing as a society, and it should be measured by how well the poor are doing, not the rich."

Geoff Tansey, Panellist and Chair of the Fabian Commission on Food and Poverty and Curator of the Food Systems Academy

Go to Sustainable Food Places website

Sign up to the Sustainable Food Places newsletter

Find local Sustainable Food Places partnerships

Photos courtesy of Sheff Food and Mara Galeano Carraro at Sustainable Food Places.

Sustainable Food Places is a partnership programme led by the Soil Association, Food Matters and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. It is funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and The National Lottery Community Fund.