Food Clubs | GeoFoodie

I’ve been poor for so long that I’ve learned to live on one main meal plus one snack a day. I think most people would class that as ‘skipping’ a meal, but for me that’s just normal, and has been for many years now.’ (Non-Food Club User, YouGov survey, 2025)

In May and June 2025 I worked with YouGov to conduct a suvery of more than 14,000 UK households with earnings of <£40K and who lived in areas of greater deprivation (IMD quintiles 1-3). Comic Relief, as part of Sainsbury’s Nourish the Nation Programme, funded this research (UoS Project 12570).

The report of the findings, titled Building Resilience: The Role of Food Clubs in UK Food Security, is published on Comic Relief’s website.

This video, produced using Notebook LM, covers some of key highlights from the report.

In addition to specifics about the survey and methodology and recommendations, the report contains five substantive sections. These are:

Analysis of food insecurity among the respondents.
Analysis of food club use and survey respondent engagement.
Analysis of the impacts of food clubs.
A comparison of food club users to those who use no services, food bank users, and those who use both services.
An analysis of why people stop using food clubs

Coverage of the report has included BBC radio interviews highlighting what food clubs are, an article in The Grocer, and two linked articles in The Guardian by Patrick Butler. These later highlight the elements of the study that demonstrate the difficulties rural people on low incomes face in accessing food.

The study makes recommendations for the government and provides evidence that local authorities can use when planning and implementing the new three-year Crisis and Resilience fund. Councils are now producing plans to implement the fund, and some have begun to signpost its resources. See, for example, how Sheffield City Council is implementing both the Crisis and Resilience (through Welcoming Places) elements of the funding.

The report’s findings are also likely to be useful to charities as they consider how to help their communities. This campaign raised over £26m and supported more than 2.4m people facing food insecurity, of which £7.7m went toward supporting 598 food clubs (see the impact report for more detail and this report by the Tavistock Institute.

The food club model is widely seen and experienced as impactful and life-changing, providing preventative and reparative support for households experiencing ongoing food insecurity as a result of financial precarity. It successfully assists those in need, while complementing, rather than replacing, emergency food banks. Food clubs help households stretch limited budgets, improve access to nutritious food, provide a welcoming space for social connection and create pathways to wider support services. (Tavistock Institute, 2026).

Examples of food clubs that were funded through the Nourish the Nation funding and how they are drawing on the Food Ladders incude:

Food Savers
The Bread and Butter Thing
Food clubs within the Feeding Britain Network

Sainsbury’s and Comic Relief have launched a new campaign, Lets put hunger to bed, that builds on the foundations of the Nourish the Nation campaign and was informed by findings from this report. According to Comic Relief:

Our aim is to help end child and family hunger, ensuring families have the stability, resources and dignity they need to thrive. We will do this by supporting community-led organisations, with the aim to:

Improve children and families’ health and wellbeing through access to good, nutritious food
Strengthen family resilience to crisis and hardship through wraparound support
Support longer-term change by bringing together communities, funders and decision-makers, and by advocating for policies that better support families.

This programme recognises that child food insecurity does not exist in isolation. Families are affected by wider pressures such as low income, insecure housing and rising living costs. Alongside practical support, the programme aims to improve the systems and policies that shape families’ lives.

Many of you will know that I do a lot of research focusing on Rung 2 of the Food Ladders. One of these organisations is The Bread and Butter Thing. I’ve known Mark and Jane since they founded the Food Club in about 2016. In 2019 we did our first member survey. I was a bit tired of the narrative around saving money. My view is you can’t save what you haven’t got in the first place. I wanted to explore the extent to which some of the benefits I had heard about qualitatively were being experienced (A classic example of the benefits of mixed methods or combining intensive and extensive research see table on page 14).

That first survey was the first one to highlight the social benefits attributed to food clubs and the extent to which members experience them (a report is available here). At the time there were just under 8000 TBBT members located in sites primarily across Greater Manchester. And although you won’t see references to this report in the reports from other food club umbrella organisations, the report was shared with them and makes up key impact measures for the sector.

Since that initial survey, TBBT has done an expanded annual members survey. From fairly humble beginnings of a survey that included about 300 responses to just a few questions, the 2024 survey has about 9.5K responses (from a population of about 80K) to a wide range of questions about people’s circumstances, how they are getting by, and how they percieve the impact of joining TBBT has been for them (Some highlights are here). This remains the only large-scale data source that is collected directly from to food club members. I have been proud to have been able to help with this and provide some analysis of the data. I have never managed to find the time to pull out all the rich insights that are buried within. One day, hopefully.

Mark and Vic recently asked me to join them for a podcast (which turned into two!) to talk about the results of the survey for this year. Vic joined TBBT toward the end of the lockdown period. Prior to that she worked for Manchester Council and when the pandemic hit she coordinated their food response brilliantly. Mark introduced me to Vic and we had many discussions about how best to meet the needs of people in Manchester depending upon their circumstances. I have written about that work in a book chapter about food security resilience under Covid 19 that appears in a book called Living with Pandemics.

The podcast, called a Slice of Bread and Butter, usually involves a conversation with a member and then a bit of discussion. These are fascinating insights into the determination and buoyancy of members in the face of struggle. They demonstrate how precarious life can be and how vulnerable most of us are to finding ourselves in similar situations. I encourage you to follow the podcast. They are available on all the major podcast sites and also on the website linked above.

Here are both episodes where we talk about just a tiny proportion of survey findings and how they reveal just how much food clubs, like TBBT, that are carefully curated, organised and managed can make a difference.

Episode 1: Revolutionising Food Support