The St Ives Community Foodshare group was set up in March 2020. To start with the group signed up with Co-op foodshare programme which allowed volunteers to collect food from St Ives 3 local Co-op’s every single evening.

Ordinarily at the end of each evening, all food that have passed it’s ‘best before’ or ‘use-by’ date has to be bagged up and thrown away. Policies of supermarkets mean that not even the staff are allowed to take this food home.

St Ives Community Foodshare volunteers go down to the 3 Co-ops after 9.15pm every night of the week, collect all these bags and take it back to their storage room at St Ives Rugby Club. The amount of food varies greatly, sometimes it can be as little as 10kgs of food, other times it can be up to 120kgs of food. Food is weighed to keep a record of food that is saved from landfill.

Athe Rugby club, volunteers lay out all the ‘best before’ food for collection the following day, mostly bread, pastries, cake, fruit and vegetable. All items that are labelled ‘Use-by’ and can be frozen & re-heated like pizza, pies, ready meals, milk, chopped veg are put into a glass fronted freezer ready to be collected. All meat is stored in another freezer, clearly labelled with how long it can remain frozen before re-use based on it’s freezing instructions. This meat is used by chefs to cook up meals for deliveries and at community meals. However when it gets close to the labelled date, it is transferred to the glass-fronted freezer for collection. Some use-by food like sandwiches, yoghurts can’t be frozen or given out the next day due to food safety laws. This food is given out the same night to various people.

St Ives Community Foodshare also signed up to Fareshare and Neighbourly who connect us with free food through various other supermarkets like Tesco, Sainsbury’s and ASDA.

Pengenna, The Cornish Bakery and Warrens Bakery in St Ives give us their surplus pasties.

The Western Hotel give us leftover Sunday lunch which gets packed up in takeaway containers for collection at Mike Peters Estate on Mondays

Cornwall Gleaning Network regularly brings us a huge amount of wonderful vegetables picked directly from the fields. Read more about gleaning below.

St Ives Community Foodshare is a registered food business and was reviewed by the health inspector July 2022, and received a 5 star rating.