It was bound to happen, the sunshine is fading, the night skies are drawing in, here comes Autumn! September ha been another busy month but it’s theme has been making lovely new friends!
We’re very proud to announce that we are now an approved caterer with the University of Manchester! We are excited to be working with a huge range of departments within the University to offer the lowest carbon catering in town! This aligns with the University’s amazing efforts to be sustainable throughout it’s operations.
We are now also a brand new member of the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce! We will be getting involved in lots of events, raising awareness and helping as many businesses as we can across Greater Manchester to reduce food waste. If you don’t already know about our mission to stamp out food waste then take a gander here.
We’ve also been making friends with some local allotments too! Paul from G7 Entertainment Services brought us some of his giant marrows grown by his own hands on his allotment! Our chefs cooked up a delicious Autumnal soup with them for Salford Astronomical Society’s ‘Star Party’. They are currently raising funds to improve their observatory to allow more people to learn about the cosmos. To infinity and beyond guys!
We also had a lovely visit from Rene, CEO at Food Works in Sheffield this month. Food Works started 5 years ago in Sheffield as “Real Junk Food Sheffield” and has grown from the same network of independent food waste projects as Open Kitchen MCR (we were formerly Real Junk Food Manchester). It was great to chat to Rene about how their project has developed, what their next plans are, and share some of our big plans for the future (top secret for now, but watch this space!).
As ever, our catering enterprise supports our work in the community. This September, we intercepted 2.8 tonnes of food and household goods, 475kgs of which was redistributed directly to a number of community organisations and independent food banks we work with on a weekly basis. We also had four lovely volunteers from CHEP join us to cook up a hearty stew and Autumnal soup (with Paul's marrows) for Coffee4Craig. It was an absolute pleasure to have them in the kitchen!
Also, our Director Corin has also published an article in I LOVE MCR on how to live plastic-free in our city! You can check out the article here!
Until next month, that is all folks!