Food Cardiff’s June Gathering took place last week, drawing together around 25 people from across the Good Food Movement.

The Food Cardiff team was pleased to welcome familiar and new faces to the Gathering, representing organisations from the public, private and third sector across the city.

The Gathering was hosted at the Temple of Peace in Cardiff’s Civic Centre with a healthy, colourful and delicious lunch provided by the Tidy Kitchen Co.

Food Cardiff Coordinator, Pearl Costello provided an introduction to Food Cardiff and the work of Food Sense Wales, the network of Food Partnerships that now covers every local authority in Wales. You can watch the intro video here.

Pearl shared the news that the Food Cardiff Good Food Autumn Festival will take place again for six weeks from mid September, with a package of small grants to support organisations with running events soon to be announced. The festival launch coincides again with St Fagan’s Food Festival and it culminates with the celebratory event to mark Cardiff’s achievement of the Gold Sustainable Food Places Award on 23 October. The event will also look forward to the development of a new Good Food Strategy for the city.

A new Food Cardiff coordinator is currently being recruited as Pearl will soon move to a new role with Food Sense Wales to support the Food Partnership network.

Guest speakers shared insight into two projects which show the Good Food Network in action.

Marie Price, clinical lead for Public Health Dietetics told the group about The Food Hour project. Its aim is to create ‘a nation of good food citizens through investing in one “food hour” per school day for children’. The goal is to develop food literacy skills, increase the uptake of free school meals and to increase home-school engagement with families.

Consultation with stakeholders, staff, parents and pupils helped to develop four themes for the programme – nutrition education, cooking, growing, environmental sustainability. The research showed strong support from pupils, staff and parents for the idea.

Staff were trained in Community Food and Nutrition Skills and Food Hour facilitation, a Food Hour toolkit was developed and six primary schools – 210 pupils – took part in the pilot of the project. More than 90% of pupils tried a new food as part of the project and increased their knowledge of the four key themes. All of the parents involved attended every session and all reported increased skills in healthy eating, budgeting, practical cooking skills and healthy snacks. Schools reported an increase in the update of school meals due to Food Hour.

The second project showcased, based on a Food Cardiff-initiated pilot, is the Planet Card.

The Planet Card has been co-designed by citizens, dietitians, farmers and Cardiff Farmers Markets and is one of ten pilots of Sustain’s Bridging the Gap. It is a preloaded card with £11 per week allowance for people on low-incomes to spend across three veg stalls at Roath and Riverside markets. Phase 2 launched in October 2024 with space for up to 150 households

Cardiff Business School secured an additional £50,000 to evaluate the programme. Dr Helena Knight from the team running the evaluation project shared the team’s initial findings with the group.

Their project is looking at how Alternative Food Networks, like the Planet Cardiff, which support food-insecure households can facilitate a fair and equitable transition to net zero agrifood systems. They are assessing changes in diet and wellbeing, identifying barriers to engagement with sustainable food systems and developing guidelines to scale initiatives.

Initial findings suggest that:

• £11 was seen to ‘go a long way’, providing enough fruit and vegetables for the week.
• Fruit and vegetables from the market are perceived as higher quality and lasting much longer than supermarket equivalent.
• Many participants are trying new foods and learning new recipes based on the produce available.
• Many participants feel empowered by the Planet Card to buy healthier fruit and vegetables and to make more thoughtful, well-informed shopping choices.
• Taking part in the Planet Card also helps some participants to strengthen existing and develop new social connections whilst visiting the markets.

Some barriers identified include:

• Some people who are new to the farmers markets feeling apprehensive to shop there initially as it’s a different experience to supermarket shopping (eg queuing, pricing)
• The cost of transport to the markets is problematic for participants who need to use public transport to get to the market.

A full evaluation of the Planet Card project is planned for the end of this phase of the pilot in November 2025. 

The next Food Cardiff Gathering will be on 23 October at the Temple of Peace. Click here for more information.