Community Pantries 

We are incredibly pleased with the success of our two new pop-up pantries that have been running for 2 months located in Selsey and Oving. Both were started in June and the growing numbers of attendees is incredibly exciting. Most recently at our Selsey pantry there was over 60 people who attended which is a great turnout for such a new event.

Currently, we have three pop-up pantries running in different districts in Chichester. This allows the community to help save food and actively reduce waste. The pop-up pantries also help to educate people on the benefits of helping reduce food waste and using items that have gone past their best before as this, unlike a use by date, is just a guideline. The three pantries are in Charles Avenue, Chichester, East beach Evangelical Church, Selsey and Jubilee Hall, Oving.

At the Oving pantry, in the Jubilee Hall, there is a chill and chat group that runs at the same time. The atmosphere there is always buzzing, and it is a joy to be part of. It really helps bring this event into the community and helps to educate a wider range of people on food waste and how to help reduce it, whilst distributing a van load of food and items to those who attend.

"It is so great to meet so many people in the community here in Oving who all are so friendly and who are all helping to reduce food waste in their homes. I only started working here 2 weeks ago and it has been great to see the increase in people attending each week and it’s such a pleasure to spend time with them at these events." - mimi

For all our pop-up pantries, the suggested donation is £2.50 for a bag of nutritious food. As with the Chichester pop-up pantry, people can help themselves to what they would like from the selection of goods that are available that day.

The selection is phenomenal and varies week by week depending on what has been delivered to our warehouse, which means there is always a different selection of goods. This week, much of the food was fresh fruit, including watermelons (thank you cityharvest!), which were very popular. There were also fresh vegetables, sausages, sweet potatoes, and smoothies which went down incredibly well. The week before however, we offered catering sized packs of cooking items and sauces as we had a surplus of these in the warehouse.