In collaboration with Impact Hub Kings Cross’ Feeding the City programme, we delivered and developed an idea generation workshop for “food-preneurs” in January 2019.

Participants were largely from Bradford, but also from as far afield as Liverpool and Hull, with a majority female demographic.

A combination of innovative vegan catering, Mary Clear’s talk on Incredible Edible, the cohort’s own introductions to each other and icebreaker exercises brought together our cohort in a fun, casual and inspirational tone.

The cohort divided into five groups to develop ideas in the problem areas identified by the Feeding the City brief. This yielded detailed proposals on Education, Food Waste, Incentivising Local Production, Redistributing Surpluses and Teaching to Cook.

Our target was to have one or two ideas submitted by Bradford to the national programme, but ultimately, five ideas (not those above) were submitted by participants and one (Beat and the Pulse) was shortlisted for the programme. The most significant outcome of the evening was a broad desire to keep the conversations going and form a group and regular meetup for foodpreneurs in the region, centred in Bradford.

In the long term, we also speculated about a possible ‘coworking for foodpreneurs’ offer, with shared food preparation facilities and the development of a food district or food scene as Bradford’s unique offer. It’s likely now that this community will be developed by one of our cohort, we believe that 50-60 members at a minimum can be recruited on launch.

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Impact Hub Bradford is a hub for social enterprise and innovation. Alongside our coworking space, we host regular events, programmes and workshops. If you’d like to discuss membership or partnering with us on an event or programme, please contact our team today – we’d love to work with you.