Well-Fed Review of 2023

2023 has proved a big year for us here at Can Cook/Well-Fed. We’ve worked with a number of partners across North Wales and in 50 communities. We have spent more time than ever in Cardiff too, at the Senedd and talking to Ministers about food policy.

Looking back across 2023, we started the year by giving evidence to the Equality and Social Justice committee at the Senedd, talking school food, student wellbeing and focusing on the ‘eater’. How can we help protect the health and wellbeing of our children and young people, as they grow up in the most challenging times in modern history, we asked?

This was closely followed by a day with Cardiff University at its Challenge-led Innovation session, Delivering on the promise? The Can Cook/Well-Fed team joined a session on food to add our experiences and see how we can innovate to create better food security for families.

We hosted our Real Meals on Wheels conference in the summer, talking about the role of food in communities and how we can better support it. As a result, we’ve launched nine Meals on Wheels centres over the course of the year. And once again we’ve attracted interested from a variety of journalists, including features on TV and radio.

World Food Day in October saw us release our report, Good: removing ultra-processed (UPF) food. As a result of that research, we’ve also committed to being UPF-free by the end of the 2023 This means that whoever we’re working with – young or old – will be eating food that’s fresh, healthy and tasty. We will be the first food production company in the UK to be UPF free.

 

Looking into our social impact:

Slow cooking: We’ve trained 276 people this year, giving each one a free slow cooker and an introduction to our slow cooker bags. Each bag contains our specifically-designed pastes and powders, making sure every slow cooker meal turns our perfect no matter who cooks it.

Mobile Shops: We now have two mobile shops, with a third due in January 2024. The shops visit 12 local areas providing fresh meal options, as well as all the staples a household would need.

FoodStore: We’ve supplied 7,800 fresh meal meal boxes to families who would have otherwise had to go to a food bank – that’s a total of 39,000 free fresh meals to struggling households.

Meal subsidy: It’s said that 54% of households in the UK can no longer afford good healthier food – we aim to change this. To do so, we have created a ‘meal subsidy’. This means our meals are cheaper than any other retail outlet. We see the meal subsidy as being vital to everyone being able to afford access to good food.

Across all of our services, we’ve served just under 227,000 meals this year (226,980, to be precise). These support young people in schools, older people in care homes and warm hubs, office workers and families; they help care for the vulnerable, others to build cookery skills and confidence and support communities without good access to fresh food.

And our plans for 2024 are even bigger. If you’d like to hear more, or work with us next year, drop us a line.

Good fresh food at affordable prices is absolutely fundamental to a healthy society. We are working hard to make sure that if anyone eats food provided by us, they can afford it, they want to eat it and when they’ve eaten it, they’ve enjoyed it.