Another year over
We’ve just published “this” year’s annual report – the year covering July 2024 to June 2025.
Juli, our CEO, introduces the report:
Last year, we spoke of “expanding horizons and deepening connections”. This year proved that even the best laid plans require resilience, adaptation, and sometimes, difficult choices. It taught us that “together” means supporting each other not just in success, but through delays, disappointments, and challenges.
Our small but mighty team continues to defy expectations. Funders, partners, and visitors still ask in amazement, “you accomplish all this with how many staff?” The answer remains our exceptional Social Return on Investment – we continue the art of transforming limited resources into real community impact.
2024-25 was meant to be the year of Darley Street Market. The already-delayed market was scheduled to open in early 2025, with our anchor unit on the ground floor as a cooking school, and on the middle floor a FoodSavers hub and events space. However, the further delays we anticipated became the delays we experienced. The opening has been pushed back yet again, with goalposts continuing to shift throughout our negotiations with Bradford Council. While frustrating, this has taught us valuable lessons about patience, persistence, and the importance of having alternatives. In the midst of these delays and continued uncertainty, we found we must close Shaw House towards the end of 2025 as the building is being purchased for redevelopment.
Our FoodSavers network continues to evolve, with existing outlets transitioning to our software platform. While we haven’t yet expanded beyond West Yorkshire as anticipated, we did spend time strengthening the resilience of the existing network.
Meanwhile, our asset-based development work with Holme in the Wood in Holmewood is opening new doors, developing their popup food offer through genuine partnership. When one opportunity stalled, we found others – proving our adaptability and commitment to our mission.
Our Cooking Hub maintained its vital work with schools and community organisations across Bradford. Kitty’s Kits continued to roll out through schools, pantries, and community groups. Our grow kits brought fresh possibilities to families across the district.
The end of the Household Support Fund finally arrived, and we successfully pivoted back toward our original mission: intercepting and redistributing surplus food, and focusing on supporting our FoodSavers outlets.
Amidst all this, we found time to celebrate our fifteenth year, and our growth from a single idea and one staff member to the work of today that you’ll found outlined below.
During 2024/25, our work increasingly focused on changing the food system itself, not simply responding to its failures. Through strategic partnerships with the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission, Sustainable Food Cities, Trussell and others, we helped advance national and local campaigns calling for Food for Health, Not Wealth and a fundamental rebalancing of how food is produced, promoted and accessed. This included contributing front line insight to policy discussions, supporting public campaigns to fix our broken food system, and amplifying lived experience through platforms such as the Feeding Britain podcast.
Across these collaborations, we championed practical, evidence-led solutions from universal free school meals and restrictions on junk food advertising, to supporting fresh food access, local supply chains and cooking from scratch.
This work is embedded locally as well as nationally. We are proud to be an active partner in Bradford’s Good Food Strategy and the city’s Anti-Poverty Strategy, ensuring that food is recognised not just as a welfare issue, but as a driver of health, dignity and economic resilience. By aligning grassroots delivery with strategic advocacy, we have helped build momentum for change – demonstrating how small, practical interventions can scale into wider system impact when citizens, communities and institutions move together. This approach continues to underpin our mission: creating food systems that nourish people first and place health, equity and sustainability at their core.
From Credit Unions to our volunteer army, from corporate allies to individual donors – our collaborative tapestry proved essential this year. When external factors created obstacles, these partnerships provided stability and alternative pathways.
Our five pillars – behaviour change, choice, dignity, empowerment, and financial inclusion – guided us through every pivot and decision. In a year when plans changed, our values didn’t.
Bradford’s challenges continue to mirror global pressures, but we’ve proven something vital: resilience isn’t just about achieving what you planned – it’s about maintaining impact when plans must change.
What sets us apart isn’t just our ambition, but our ability to adapt without losing sight of our mission. We remain committed to collaboration, innovation, and unwavering respect for human dignity.
Juli Thompson, CEO
Read or download the full report below:
