Fresh Fruit, Smarter Spending: How Camden’s HAF Providers Are Working Together

The most obvious way to support our providers would be with more funding. Right now this is difficult. So we look for ways to make the funding we’re allocating to our HAF providers go further.

Food is a key benefit of the Holidays Activities and Food Programme - it’s in the title! And the price of food in the UK keeps rising with no signs of stopping. This has a huge impact on HAF providers. On top of preparing and serving a meal every session, pretty much every site in Camden offers fresh fruit as healthy snacks to the children who attend their provision each day. After discussions with a handful of site managers, I estimated that organisations are spending anywhere from £80 to £250 per week on sourcing fresh produce to serve to young people. That’s a big chunk of budget and a lot of daily shopping too.

I attended a Kentish Town Food Action Group meeting a few months back and was inspired by the dedication of Kentish Town City Farm’s CEO Pamela Park in looking for an initiative to improve the level of food support that their HAF provision could offer. As luck would have it, this meeting was timed well with the planning of Camden Partnership’s Food Hub. With the guidance and help of Rose Alexander, who helps to lead We Make Camden’s Food Partnership, the seed of a project was planted.*

The Food Hub is working closely with Wholegood – a fresh produce wholesaler that sources from farms and growers with the explicit intention to “champion a more equitable food system for all” . Rose set up a meeting and, with Wholegood’s support, we launched a HAF pilot. The plan was to see what we could buy if we consolidated the money that HAF providers were spending at supermarkets on fruit. With Wholegood, could we get cheaper, higher quality and responsibly sourced produce for young Camdeners? … We enlisted an enterprising bunch of organisations who were up for tackling the challenge with us.

With the help of awesome teams of staff, we were able to trial two large deliveries of produce being dropped at two “HAF Food Hubs”. These deliveries were sorted and redistributed to smaller “HAF Food Satellites”. We had boxes of blueberries, grapes, apples, mangos, oranges and nectarines – all organic and packed into home-recyclable packaging. And the feedback was great! Sites reported handing out high-quality fruit to happy children and families, with one organisation even getting their HAF attendees involved in preparing some delicious sounding fruit salad!

But to what extent does this improve things for HAF providers?

We spent close to £540 running the pilot. We reached seven sites - four in the North of Camden and three in the South. We ordered enough fruit to hopefully cover a week’s worth of snacks for each organisation depending on the number of young people they had attending. With two deliveries for each Hub, we provided the seven sites with an average of £76 of fruit.

We compared prices with Tesco’s cheapest home brand, non-organic equivalent. If our sites had bought the cheapest version of the same fruit at their local Tesco, we would still have saved everybody a combined total of £30.37.

Now, excuse the food pun*, but that’s very small potatoes when split between seven sites. You could also argue that sites might have gotten even cheaper produce at a Morrisons, or a Lidl or an Aldi.

But the real value lies elsewhere. None of these supermarkets regularly sell organic nectarines, mangos, peaches, grapes or oranges. Tesco’s does have organic apples and organic blueberries. Gala apples from Tesco organic will cost you an extra £1.48 per kilo. And for organic blueberries, the price increases by £8.38 per kilo.

It is difficult to gauge a realistic average across all fruit as they range wildly in expense, but If we’re conservative and estimate that Tesco sells all organic fruit for an additional modest £1 per kilo –the estimated saving of our pilot would rise from £30.37 to £381.07.

If we were to collectively bulk order from Wholegood over the four weeks of DfE-funded Summer HAF, these seven sites would save an estimated £1524.29 between them.

We commissioned roughly 30 organisations to run HAF this Summer. Imagine how fruitful* this conservative projection becomes when you consider what we could have saved if we purchased collectively for everyone. (And delivered it all in recyclable packaging).

Because staff weren’t nipping to the shops every day, we hopefully saved site time too. When you’re delivering youth provision every minute is invaluable.

I’ll be shouting about this to all our HAF providers in the hopes of placing more collective orders in the future. And I can’t wait to see what further rewards we’ll reap! But what’s clear from this pilot is that it would mean we’ll be supporting more equitable food systems, helping children receive more exciting food, and getting young people the very best nutrition over the school holidays.

If you’re a local organisation with an appetite to support Camden’s young people by donating towards these fresh fruit orders, we’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch with adam@youngcamdenfoundation.org.uk.