Students gather to grow sustainable food social enterprises 

Thursday 21-06-2018 - 10:44

NUS's sustainable food programme Student Eats – kindly funded by The Big Lottery Fund through the Our Bright Future programme - has recently hosted a gathering of student-led social enterprises, supporting them to grow.  

Between 11th and 13th June, in Leeds University's students' union, NUS' Student Eats has hosted around 40 members of student-led sustainable food social enterprises and relevant experts, came together to share learnings about growth. The event brought together both students and students' union staff from universities and colleges from across the UK to help them scale-up. The enterprises range from locally grown & pressed apple juices, to mixed salad leaves expanding to edible flowers & herbs, to surplus soup and have been awarded over £100,000 in total! 

Setting up and growing a social enterprise of any kind requires a lot of foresight, planning, learning, and organisational skills. Across the days, attendees could listen to and participate in a series of talks and workshops.  

After an evening of delicious (mostly vegan) Indian food and networking, the next day, Nathan Brown, Our Bright Future Social Enterprise Advisor, gave an inspiring talk about social enterprise scale-up. In his presentation, he highlighted the importance of ethical and sustainable growth. After all, he said, what is the use of building a social enterprise if growth entails negative social or environmental impacts? Growth is only good in as far as it doesn't undermine the foundational values of the enterprise, he highlighted. During this session, attendees shared their own top tips for engaging students, too - for example, by making promotional videos and doing outreach.   

During day one, we also heard from Student Eats project officer Tilly Jarvis, who spoke about creating business plans for social enterprises. Tilly runs her own sustainable food social enterprise, Six Legs Farm, one of the UK'S first edible insect farms! People also listened to a presentation by Jackie Cooper from Lord Ashcroft International Business School, Anglia Ruskin University, who shared her knowledge on managing finances to keep social enterprises thriving. After this, Ashley Storer-Smith from the Student Volunteering Network (Brighton Students' Union) had some great insights into volunteer recruitment, engagement and succession. For example, detailing the free or low cost ways campaigns or groups can reward student volunteers for their support. Day one closed with each enterprise having dedicated time to work on their business plans, with 1-2-1 support from advisors on different aspects, such as money management and communications.  

Day two brought lots more valuable advice for the student-led social enterprise teams. First up was Rachel Drayson, Insight Manager for the NUS Sustainability team, who shared her expertise on measuring impact. Next up was Jenny Bell, NUS' Ethical Supply Chain Coordinator, and expert on corporate sustainability Martyn Seal, who spoke about supplier relationship management – and finding out which suppliers really match the ethics of your enterprise. Finally, Liz Woodward from the Soil Association (one of our delivery partners) gave a presentation on food safety.  

The last half of the final day was all about finalising those business plans, with more support from the day's expert advisors - before the grand finale of presentations from each enterprise!  

Penryn Produce shared the importance of building face-to-face relationships for their enterprise, and of creating a vision to guide their work. They also spoke about making their growing site accessible for student volunteers. Speaking of which, their top tip for getting eager volunteers was to get one person on board who has lots of friends interested in sustainability! Also, they suggested giving volunteers defined job roles to increase their commitment levels.  

Exeter VegShare told us that surveys are important to their enterprise, allowing them to find out what consumers want, need, and how they behave. They said that targeting student societies and interest groups was really effective in building support – in their case, they've identified that they've already saturated the vegetarian and vegan community. In the coming months, they're going to introduce ways to reduce labour costs, introduce card payments, and start adding microgreens to their repertoire!  

This is our Jam is about reconnecting students with food, said its founders – providing knowledge and skills to last a lifetime. The group told us that they're planning to contact academic departments with related interests – such as the business and nutrition departments – to increase uptake and reach students.  

The Apple Project told the group about their intention to balance their approach between a quality product, and a purpose that has integrity. That is, to provide personal and professional support and skills to further education learners. Through The Apple Project, for instance, students gain confidence in social skills, food hygiene, and maths and English. Next up for The Apple Project, among other priorities, is to design lovely labels – they're going down the 'wine label route'!  

Leeds University Union's non-hierarchical, student-led enterprise shared their priority to work with an ethos of carbon neutrality, sustainable food and healthy lifestyles. They want to distribute their product by dividing it into thirds, split between customers, volunteers, and the homeless community. In terms of communications, they're looking forward to building a beautiful Instagram feed – and creating some funny salad-related memes! 

SCRAN (students creating resources around nutrition) are keen to build their workshops in schools and universities, and see nurturing relationships as integral to their next steps – such as with the university catering manager. We're looking forward to reading the blogpost they're going to write about this Students Eats residential, to share their learnings! 

Edible Campus wants to position themselves as a one-stop-shop representing a common ground for cooking, growing, and community – all the while highlighting the important links to climate change. They're planning to expand their enterprise to include value-added products like jams and flavoured oils. 

90 Food Lab told everyone about their unique mission to combine cultural integration, education about Chinese culture, and dumpling-cooking workshops! They're working on getting more students involved, as at the moment their customers are mostly the wider community. As part of this, they'll be making videos as training material to improve volunteers' teaching skills  

Finally, EcoSoup told us how their surplus food enterprise will feed staff, students and the homeless community. They're looking forward to setting up stalls at varied events – including during Welcome Week – and to building relationships within the university, such as with specific academic departments.  

NUS Student Eats is extremely proud of all the enterprises we support; we had a great few days of learning this week,  and can't wait to see how everyone progresses. 

Thank you also to our partner Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming, who supported five of these enterprises at their start-up phase.  

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