Our Impact
Our mission is to reduce food waste, reduce food poverty, and build community in our little corner of Hackney, and we hope our impact spreads throughout London and beyond. It can be difficult to quantify these lofty goals, but we collect data on all facets of our work: food donations received, meals served, people served, cash donations received, volunteer hours worked, and more. Every month we compile all that information and publish a freely available summary document with the aim to ignite a conversation between volunteers, guests, and donors to orient our efforts on everything from the tiny details to the big picture, posing questions such as:
How many people did we help last month?
Should we buy a new picnic bench to expand our outdoor seating?
Do we need to recruit extra kitchen volunteers?
Can we afford to invest in a new chest freezer?
When should we seek out a new food donor?
How can we reach a larger, more diverse audience?
Scroll through this page for a sample of some of the numbers we’ve collected over the past two years, along with an archive of all our monthly summary documents.
How many people are we serving?
Since we started tracking data in early 2022, our impact as measured by the number of meals we serve each month has been on a general upward trajectory, fueled in part by word-of-mouth and increased funding, but also the increased demand for our services spurred by the UK cost of living crisis.
Not all the guests who use our service lack the means to pay for a meal, but many are struggling with the rising cost of essentials like rent and utilities, and a free or low-cost meal at our cafe once or twice a week can make a small but significant difference in the household budget.
Where does our funding come from?
Pay-what-you-can donations (shown as the cash and card revenue series in blue and red in the above chart) only cover about a third of our total expenses. The majority of our income comes from two large grants (shown in green) we received in 2023: the first, £6,000 from the Hackney Council to fight the cost of living crisis in early 2023, and the second, from the Charity of Sir Richard Whittington administered by The Mercers’ Company, for over £50,000 that will be dispersed over the course of two years.
How do we spend the donations we receive?
Some of our biggest expenses (e.g. rent, wages) are fixed and overall they account for about two-thirds of our total expenditures. The rest of our expenses vary month to month (e.g. ingredients, paper goods, uniforms, volunteer travel, new equipment, etc.) and it’s here we’re constantly looking to economise in order to keep our cafe on safe financial footing and allow us to expand our offerings.
People are often surprised to hear how much we spend on ingredients, given the majority of our ingredients are upcycled food donations, however we always need basic staples (e.g. milk, butter, flour, sugar, spices) which are rarely donated. Paper consumables like takeaway bowls, cups, and carrier bags are another large expense, but one we think worthwhile to enable our guests to take away another meal for themselves or for friends and family who can’t attend the cafe in person.
We’re always looking for partners to help cut costs wherever possible. For example, as visible in the above chart, fresh cut flowers used to be a significant part of our budget, but since partnering with a local florist we get a batch of their excess flowers each week, which saves us money and helps them reduce waste — a win-win!