Nourishing Communities: The Open Kitchens Initiative

The conversation with Lisa Carey, who leads onboarding at Open Kitchens, unveils a heartfelt narrative of community-driven efforts to combat food insecurity in the UK. As the pandemic exposed critical vulnerabilities within the hospitality industry, Open Kitchens emerged as a beacon of hope, uniting restaurants to provide nutritious meals for those struggling to afford food.

Lisa's insights highlight the stark reality of food poverty, with statistics revealing that 8.4 million people in the UK face challenges in accessing adequate nutrition, particularly children. This episode dives deep into the operational framework of Open Kitchens, illustrating how they leverage local restaurants to produce meals at a fraction of the cost, thus making meaningful contributions to their communities.

Listeners gain a rich understanding of how the initiative operates, including the crowdfunding model that allows kitchens to solicit donations to cover meal preparation costs. Lisa shares inspiring stories from those who have benefited from the initiative, such as Bill, who had been living on meager meals until Open Kitchens provided him with wholesome, ready-to-eat options.

The episode also discusses the collaborative efforts with celebrities like Vicky McClure and Penny Lancaster, whose involvement not only raises awareness but also galvanizes support from the broader community. This celebrity endorsement has proven vital in attracting volunteers and donations, enhancing the program's reach and impact.

As the podcast unfolds, Timothy and Sarah engage Lisa in a discussion about the evolving landscape of community support post-pandemic. They explore how attitudes toward food security have shifted, encouraging a collective action mindset among individuals and businesses alike. The narrative weaves in themes of resilience, hope, and the fundamental human connection that drives these initiatives. For anyone interested in social responsibility, the hospitality sector, or community engagement, this episode resonates with powerful messages of collaboration and the transformative potential of coming together to support those in need.

For more info on Open Kitchens: https://openkitchens.co.uk/

Ways you can help: https://openkitchens.co.uk/help

Takeaways:

Open Kitchens is a national initiative that connects restaurants with communities to address food insecurity.
The collaboration between restaurants and local communities has raised over £340,000 for meals.
Celebrity endorsements, like those from Vicky McClure, significantly amplify the reach of community initiatives.
The pandemic highlighted the critical need for nutritious meals for vulnerable populations in the UK.
Open Kitchens provides a structured platform for restaurants to crowdfund meal production costs effectively.
The initiative has expanded its reach from Nottingham to various cities, including London and Cardiff.

Music: Brain Power by Mela, freemusicarchive.org & Pawel Sikorski

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Sarah Kettel
00:00:09.000 - 00:00:10.965
Talking Hospitality

Timothy R Andrews
00:00:18.105 - 00:00:25.609
Welcome to our podcast Talking Hospitality. I'm Timothy R Andrews and this is my co host Sarah Kettel.

Sarah Kettel
00:00:25.697 - 00:00:26.325
Hello.

Timothy R Andrews
00:00:27.105 - 00:00:46.017
Talking Hospitality is a podcast looking at issues within hospitality solutions and inspirational stories within the sector. The podcast is shared on all major platforms, iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, YouTube and Audible.

Sarah Kettel
00:00:46.121 - 00:00:51.635
Today we are talking to Lisa Carey who is head of onboarding at Open Kitchens. Welcome, Lisa.

Lisa Carey
00:00:51.825 - 00:00:53.515
Hi, nice to meet you both.

Timothy R Andrews
00:00:54.055 - 00:01:00.335
Lovely to meet you too. Lisa. Can you tell us all about Open Kitchens? What is it and what do you do?

Lisa Carey
00:01:00.415 - 00:03:42.205
Open Kitchens, the not for profit national food solution.

With a partnership with Fair Share, it brings together restaurants and their communities to fund, produce and deliver meals to those that really need it. Open Kitchen started April this year on the Back of the Pandemic. My sort of usual day to day is working for a restaurant booking guide.

Godine, along with my MD Adam Roberts, worked with the hospitality industry for many years. On the Back of the Pandemic we lost a lot of our clients.

It was an opportunity, I guess, for us to consider what we can do to help during the crisis and how we can bring together restaurants and their communities to help fund and cook meals for their local communities.

Set about sort of bringing together Open Kitchens and Adam Roberts along with co founder Alex Grundy created Open Kitchens and Open Kitchens was born as of 1st April, we set about building the website and reaching out to local restaurants, starting Nottingham, reaching out to local kitchens and asking them to sort of get involved in the initiative. The way it works is that we ask kitchens to reach out to their local communities to help crowdfund the cost of meals.

So kitchens can crowdfund for £1 85 per meal, but they would volunteer their time to cook these meals, get their support from their kitchen staff, their chefs, our teams to sort of help pull the meals together.

So the meals are produced in the restaurant's kitchens and we ask them for nutritional meals that are suitable for sort of reheating at home and kitchens basically come on and, you know, pledge their support through openkitchens.co.uk and then set about fundraising.

Really that's the initial start of the campaign, is to really sort of reach out to their audience and ask them to help support, cover the costs, the meals and as I say, that's up to sort of £1 85 per meal. But across the kitchens that we've got involved at the moment, that's coming out around £1 60, the price covers the ingredients.

So the raw Ingredients is about £1 50 to cover those initial costs. The remainder of the funds are for the PPE equipment that they'll need to cook the meal safely to help, you know, reduce transmission.

Also the packaging and the labels. So that's all covered within that crowd funding amount. Really.

The feedback that we're getting from kitchens, from chefs, from people that are donating, has just been fantastic throughout, really.

Sarah Kettel
00:03:42.365 - 00:04:01.621
You've got some pretty big names signed on as well.

I was very excited to see what was on your website, Lisa, because you've got people like Nottingham Forest Football Club and you've got the Hilton Metropole in London. You've also got Flatiron Steak, one of my favourite steakhouses. And then you've got a video with a message from Vicki McClure.

Lisa Carey
00:04:01.773 - 00:04:02.509
Yes.

Sarah Kettel
00:04:02.677 - 00:04:10.285
Oh, my goodness. So confession. Spent all of lockdown watching the entire three series of Line Of Duty.

Lisa Carey
00:04:10.405 - 00:06:30.785
Me too, Me too. Absolutely love it. And she's been absolutely fantastic. She's really sort of been a bit of an ambassador for us, really.

Specifically in a campaign that we ran throughout the summer. We did a campaign called Holiday Hunger during the summer holidays and that was to sort of feed children in Nottingham.

Specifically in Nottingham is the first sort of campaign that we did over the five weeks. Food poverty wise, it's pretty bad as things go. Well, 8.4 million people, I think it is, across the UK, sort of struggling to afford to eat.

At the moment, a quarter of those numbers are children. So it is a real. It's a. It's a real problem.

What we wanted to do was work with Fair Share UK to help get a campaign off the ground called holiday hunger. Vicki McClure had already sort of engaged with us as Open Kitchens prior to this, but really sort of got behind the Holiday Hunger campaign.

So what we did was we raised funds to cover the costs of meals for children specifically. We got 11 kitchens to cook in Nottingham and we cooked 12,000 meals specifically for children and got them out over the five weeks on the holiday.

Penny Lancaster as well, she really got behind the Open Kitchens initiative.

She went down to the Hilton Metropolitan London, helped plate up some meat meals and helped us sort of package them up and get them loaded up into their chilled vans to get them out and delivered. As for the Hilton being involved, we've had a great relationship with the Hilton brand as well, across their sort of estate, really.

Russell, who runs the kitchen at the Metropole in London, has been absolutely fantastic. He's been helping replenish surplus food and cooking that into nutritious meals. So he's been trying to bring the cost value down of the meals.

Whereas we're crowdfunding for up to £1.85, Russell's been able to produce meals for less than sort of 50p because he's been able to replenish food that would have otherwise gone to landfill. Two million tonnes of food is wasted by the food industry each year. 250,000 tonnes of that is still edible.

So there's people out there struggling for food, yet there's enough food out there for everyone.

And so I think the key thing is for us to, to bridge that gap with the hospitality industry and tap into capacities in restaurants kitchens to cook and turn this food into nutritional meals.

Sarah Kettel
00:06:31.125 - 00:06:34.261
Have you had lots and lots of volunteers from our sector helping you out?

Lisa Carey
00:06:34.333 - 00:08:20.789
Yeah, absolutely. Initially we had, yeah. We were inundated with people sort of wanting to help, which was fantastic because we needed it to sort of off the ground.

And now, as we continue, we are working with volunteers sort of broken down by region, and it tends to be people with a hospitality background. But from an open kitchens perspective, I would say it's helped sort of bridge a gap of nutritional meals that are available for people.

I mean, I'm not sure if you're aware, but there were people, as people were sort of expected to shield through the pandemic, they were given food parcels from the government as part of a scheme. But a lot of the contents of the parcels were, you know, separate ingredients that sort of needed to be put together and made into a meal.

And there were people out there that, I guess, unable to cook a meal, whether that be through physically able to cook or whether that be through the equipment that they have in their house.

This is where we can really sort of bridge that gap in supplying ready made nutritional meals, but from a restaurant quality rather than something that's, you know, full of sugar and salt. This is something that's really been put together. We had some feedback from a gentleman called Bill who was receiving these shielding boxes.

He was actually unable to stand and cook these meals themselves with these raw ingredients. And we found that he'd been eating kidney beans on toast for weeks. He hadn't really had a hot meal.

And, you know, it's just to be able to provide a meal from a restaurant to Bill was amazing, a great feeling and he was, you know, obviously over the moon that he could just get something and put it in the microwave and become part of the scheme.

Sarah Kettel
00:08:20.877 - 00:08:49.919
There's a lot of companies out there right now who do food Packaging. And everyone went to take away. Everyone went to deliver it.

Hey, we all get those emails, right, about, you know, packaging and equipment for our industry. And we all. We've all had the emails going, hey, we've got 50 billion in stock of this certain tub and this for your takeaway.

Those companies are doing very well. Is it too much to ask that those companies give a bit back? We know how much they cost per unit and we know how much we get charged per unit.

Chuck some the right way.

Lisa Carey
00:08:50.047 - 00:08:50.955
Exactly.

Sarah Kettel
00:08:51.975 - 00:09:06.055
Is there a company out there that will donate packaging to you, Lisa, and to every other Fair Share project that's going on? I think you should. I'm saying that to you as an industry. Packaging industry. Listen up. That's what I want you to do.

Lisa Carey
00:09:06.675 - 00:09:23.055
I think that's a good shout. Absolutely. Overall, it could bring the cost down per meal, which means we can cook more. We can get kitchens to cook more for less money.

The more we can bring that £1, 85 down, the better. Just means we can keep cooking.

Sarah Kettel
00:09:23.395 - 00:09:24.299
Absolutely.

Timothy R Andrews
00:09:24.427 - 00:09:28.295
What other areas other than Nottingham are you working in now?

Lisa Carey
00:09:28.795 - 00:10:07.869
So it started in Nottingham and then we reached out to Sheffield, Derby, Leicester, we've in London, Bristol, recently moved into Cardiff. So in Wales, Liverpool in sort of six months. And we've got 50 kitchens now involved across the country.

We've raised over £340,000 now, which is the equivalent of 180,000 meals.

So we're sort of spreading out now and it's just, I guess we need to sort of get into all the different regions as quick as we can to help fight this food crisis.

Timothy R Andrews
00:10:07.957 - 00:10:09.505
How can people get involved?

Lisa Carey
00:10:10.005 - 00:11:04.281
So any kitchens can sort of get involved. It's a case of going onto the website. So openkitchens.co.uk the kitchen can pledge to cook meals.

Kitchens can choose how many meals they can cook on a weekly basis and over what sort of duration of time they're able to sort of commit, really.

What we tend to do on the back of a kitchen pledging is to sort of talk them through the kind of expectations of being involved in open kitchens, how we will support a kitchen as well. So obviously there's the fundraising obligation, but that fundraising is there to cover the costs of the meals and the equipment required to cook.

And we talk them through the whole process, really, from start to finish. It is funding dependent, so they wouldn't be.

Kitchens wouldn't be expected to cook if they don't have the funds there to do so, which is where we would help them with the campaign.

Timothy R Andrews
00:11:04.353 - 00:11:18.605
So we Talked about Bill earlier. Have you met or spoken to or have any other examples of somebody that's also come through and had a positive help from you guys?

Lisa Carey
00:11:19.505 - 00:12:12.599
Yes, there was a young gentleman. I think he was probably. I think he was around 14, 15, and he was part of a large family. I think he had around five siblings.

We supplied them with meals and his feedback was absolutely brilliant. He said that he had never eaten out in a restaurant before, had never been out as a family to eat and dine in a restaurant.

So to have a restaurant quality meal at home was the best thing he'd ever had. And it driven him to work hard to be able to work in the hospitality industry because he enjoyed it so much and it was just brilliant.

It was really nice to receive that feedback. Yeah.

Timothy R Andrews
00:12:12.727 - 00:12:18.595
Lisa, you come across as incredibly humble, but this is amazing, isn't it?

Lisa Carey
00:12:18.695 - 00:12:31.123
Just a fantastic initiative to be a part of. It is something that will be a forever initiative.

Just opened my eyes, really, as to what is actually going on out there and people that need the help and how we can help as an industry.

Sarah Kettel
00:12:31.259 - 00:12:36.923
Do you think the attitudes towards feeding our communities has changed in light of the COVID crisis?

Lisa Carey
00:12:37.019 - 00:13:13.875
I do, yeah. Absolutely. I feel as a nation that we've got a lot more involved in our local communities.

I'm not sure about yourselves, but my local community sort of rallied around at the start of the pandemic, sort of handing out flyers and, you know, to those that are isolating to see if they have the provisions that they need. I mean, these flyers had one person sort of mobile number on this flyer to say, get in touch if you need help.

And then we had a WhatsApp group for anybody that can sort of dip in and go and help pick up a prescription or pick up a pint of milk.

Timothy R Andrews
00:13:14.675 - 00:13:16.855
When I listen to you, I just can't stop smiling.

Lisa Carey
00:13:17.715 - 00:13:18.195
No.

Sarah Kettel
00:13:18.275 - 00:13:23.055
I'm feeling like a massive, like, heart burst right now for everything you're doing Lisa, really.

Lisa Carey
00:13:24.075 - 00:13:44.407
I know, but it's not just me, there's a lot of people behind it.

Obviously, I'm on the kind of onboarding side of things and the connection with the kitchens, but there's a big team behind the sort of marketing behind it, and obviously Adam is. Adam and Alex have very driven, which is, you know, also why it's where it's at.

Sarah Kettel
00:13:44.551 - 00:13:50.995
What's been proved during lockdown and by the hospitality industry is anything's possible, Anything.

Lisa Carey
00:13:52.295 - 00:13:53.191
I would agree.

Timothy R Andrews
00:13:53.303 - 00:13:59.715
Are there people that may be listening to this that might want to donate to you? Is there a way they can do that. Make donations?

Lisa Carey
00:14:00.255 - 00:14:25.485
Yeah, absolutely. So donations are taken through just giving. If you go to openkitchens.co.uk, you can click through to donate to the main page on there.

Alternatively, if you have a local kitchen by looking at the map that's close to you that you'd like to donate to locally to your community, then you can select that kitchen and donate directly to that kitchen.

Timothy R Andrews
00:14:26.585 - 00:14:28.481
Thank you very much, Lisa.

Lisa Carey
00:14:28.513 - 00:14:29.193
Yeah, thank you.

Timothy R Andrews
00:14:29.289 - 00:14:31.955
I really appreciate that. Good luck with everything that you're doing.

Lisa Carey
00:14:32.065 - 00:14:34.999
Thank you. You too. Yeah, speak to you soon.

Timothy R Andrews
00:14:35.087 - 00:14:59.075
Okay, take care. Bye Bye.

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