Words by Smiley Team
A new half price grocery store has opened in Lincoln to help tackle food poverty in the area, alongside cutting food waste.
The Lincoln Community Grocery opened on 5 October in partnership with Alive Church Lincoln, Acts Trust and The Message Trust, and was designed to help people in the city who are struggling financially to cut the cost of a weekly food shop.
A yearly membership costs just £5, meaning people have access to two weekly shops, worth £3 each, with a set selection of redistributed surplus fresh fruit and vegetables, tinned goods, frozen foods and much more. The community grocery estimates that it will save people up to £30 on each weekly shop.
(Find out more about this children’s charity fighting food poverty)
Step inside the grocery and you’ll find a range of food options fresh from local supermarkets, meaning members can shop for their whole family at the fraction of the cost of a supermarket.
The food comes from surplus stock from supermarkets that would typically end up going to landfill, so it is environmentally beneficial, helping to save tonnes of food being wasted annually, as well as helping people on the breadline financially.
But there’s not just food on offer - in each store, you’ll also find a range of free support on offer, such as job clubs, healthy cooking classes, money management support, exploring Christianity courses and more.
The pandemic has only highlighted how many people struggle to make ends meet; the Food Foundation found that 4.7 million adults and 2.3 million children lived in a household which experienced food insecurity in the first 6 months of the pandemic, including 12 percent of all households with children.
According to Simon Hawking, chief executive of Acts Trust, the new Community Grocer in Lincoln will be a safe haven, for anyone to come free of judgement. It’s different from a food bank - although these are still very much needed - in that it gives people different options of what they can take home to eat.
(Here’s a brilliant idea for zero waste)
The Community Grocer also has outlets in Bolton, Hexham, Netherton, Ragworth, Redcar, Salford, Sharston, Sheffield, Telford and Wigan.
The Lincoln Community Grocery will be open between 9.30am and 4.30pm Monday to Friday at Central Methodist Church on Lincoln High Street. You can find out more and learn how to support it here.
