Februray ‘26
A short but busy month again for ICFN!
Started chitting potatoes in preparation for Potato Week - over 600 Casablanca seed potatoes! This will be our 3rd annual Potato Week. The idea behind it is to encourage our community to think more about growing some of their own veg and to spark conversations about eating healthier food and cooking from scratch. We will be giving out 300 pots to community gardens, groups and 15 Early Learning Centres across Inverclyde.
Find out more about Potato Week, chitting and growing potatoes here
Our Food Distribution pilot project kicked off and has been a great success! We were funded by Inverclyde Climate Action Network to trial a volunteer delivery driver project, redistributing excess or ‘waste’ supermarket food to Early Learning Centres across Inverclyde. We have 11 volunteers who are coordinated by a Whatsapp Group, picking up food from Branchton Community Centre. They get a £5 Aldi voucher as a thank you for each delivery. Nearly a tonne of food has been saved from landfill already and nursery staff have reported that families have been very grateful for the food. A fantastic achievement! Well done to all our volunteers! The project runs until the end of March and then we will see how and if we can continue.
In addition to the deliveries we have held 4 ‘Ready Steady Cook’ sessions, showing people what they could make with the ‘waste’ food we collected that day. These were great fun to do and sparked lots of great conversations about ways people use up food or prevent waste. There is always lots of excess bread and so we chatted about how it can be frozen and used as and when needed. Freezing bread increases its resistant starch, which slows digestion and can lower its glycemic index, actually making it slightly better for blood sugar control than fresh bread!
We held a Valentine ‘Moveable Feast’ at Craigend Community Centre which was a great success! Chef Steven Paul helped out by making his fantastic home made pizzas! We had 3 courses, starting with Carrot and Tomato soup, then healthy pizza and salad followed by fresh fruit salad and yogurt. The majority of the ingredients came from food waste! Thanks to all who came and we hope you enjoyed the food, the company and the conversations!
More soup bags were made up and delivered to Early Learning Centres, taking our total this winter to 370 bags! We aim to encourage families and carers to think about cooking from scratch more, eating healthy food as well as helping a wee bit with the weekly food bill. Feedback from the nurseries has been great.
We were invited to talk to the Kilmacolm Outlook Group about our food waste project and wider work. Once again, we received lots of support and very kindly, a donation towards future work. Thanks to Jill and the Outlook Group!
Lastly, we continued with our weekly pick of waste food from Lidl for Belville’s food share and coffee grounds from The Alchemist coffee bar for community composting. Saving it all from landfill and putting it to good use! #zerowaste
