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Food

This Catering Company Turns Landfill Food into Office Lunches

Open Kitchen in Manchester salvages its ingredients from what other companies deem to be waste food.
A selection of dishes prepared by The Real Junk Food Project Mcr chef Matthew Bailey using ingredients deemed to be waste food. Photo by the author.  

It’s a sunny Saturday morning in Manchester and chef Matthew Bailey is preparing brunch in his home kitchen. On the menu are sourdough bagels with smoked mackerel, charred broccoli steaks, and saffron layered potatoes. Each dish is representative of what new catering company Open Kitchen hopes to offer when it opens—all with a much lower carbon footprint than its local competitors.

The reason Open Kitchen can make such a claim before it has even launched? All the ingredients Bailey is using have been salvaged from what other companies deem to be waste food.

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Open Kitchen is a new initiative from The Real Junk Food Mcr, the Manchester arm of a global network of waste-food-salvaging restaurants and shops. They recently launched a £50,000 crowdfunding campaign to bring the social enterprise catering company to life.

Joining us in Bailey’s kitchen is Corin Bell, founder of The Real Junk Food Mcr and the driving force behind Open Kitchen. Reaching for a salvaged bagel, she tells me that a third of the world’s food goes to waste. While households are to blame for some of this, waste is present at every stage of production, from farms to small artisan independents and the biggest restaurant chains. But perhaps the most unrelenting culprits are supermarkets.

Sourdough bagels with mackerel. Photo by the author.

“The ones that have in-store bakeries will bake endless amounts of croissants and bagels, not because they think they’ll sell them,” says Bell, “but because it’s cheap and the smell makes people hungry, meaning they’ll buy more.”

The paradox is that while there is surplus food in the UK, more and more people are going hungry.

“Since we had that first economic crash in 2009, there’s been a significant year-on-year rise of people who are reliant on food banks,” Bell tells me. “As a society, we tend to think more clearly about things like water. United Utilities cannot cut off your supply, whether you pay the bill or not, because it’s recognised that water is essential for life and people will die without it. But food, if you can’t afford it, then you can’t have it.”

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Charred courgettes and broccoli.

Working in sustainability for many years, Bell came up with the idea for a “pay-as-you-feel” restaurant serving waste food after meeting The Real Junk Food Project founder Adam Smith in 2014. The Real Junk Food Mcr restaurant opened in 2017 on the city’s Oxford Road, and served food donated by companies including online supermarket Ocado and fruit and vegetable wholesaler New Smithfield Market. During its one-year lease, the restaurant served between 100 and 150 lunches and 60 dinners a day, while attracting all manner of customers.

“The lunch crowd was particularly eclectic—we had local office workers, retired people, students, people who were homeless, refugees, and asylum seekers,” Bells recounts.

But given the unprecedented number of people living in food poverty in Manchester, the pay-as-you-feel model was not sustainable. Many people who came to the restaurant could not afford to pay anything at all.

“In a city like Manchester, where there are a lot of people who are street homeless, who are not having a great time financially, it’s really tricky,” Bell explains.

The Open Kitchen team from left to right: Anna Town, Matthew Bailey, Corin Bell, and Andrew Callaghan.

When the restaurant’s lease ran out, Bell, Bailey, and the rest of the six-strong Real Junk Food Mcr team decided to rethink the project’s strategy. They came up with Open Kitchen, a waste food catering company that would intercept more food than the restaurant model—and offer better financial returns.

Operating out of a commercial kitchen in south Manchester’s Chorlton, Open Kitchen aims to provide catered meal options at a range of prices. But will the enterprise be able to compete with the mainstream catering companies, while keeping its commitment to only using waste food?

Bell is confident that they will. “Food businesses are starting to recognise that their customers care about food waste and they can’t just keep throwing things away,” she reasons. “They’ve got find ways to do something different.”

Open Kitchen will no doubt attract customers who care about the UK’s growing food waste problem, but only the quality of the dishes can keep them coming back. Luckily, after sampling Bailey’s breakfast feast, I can say with some certainty that Open Kitchen already has this in the bag.