Bury wins coveted Sustainable Food Place Silver award

Bury has won a Sustainable Food Places award. The award recognises Bury Food Partnership’s work to promote healthy, sustainable and local food and to tackle some of today’s greatest social challenges; from food poverty and diet-related ill-health, to the disappearance of family farms and the loss of independent food retailers.

Bury Food Partnership launched the Bury Food Strategy – Eat, Live, Love Food in 2021. It has since been integrated as part of the wider Bury Council 2030 Let’s Do It Strategy and aligning with complementary strategies has opened the way for food-related issues to be considered in many areas, such as Anti-Poverty, Climate Action, Cultural and Economic Growth.

Bury Food Partnership prides itself on being a positive space to connect, challenge and help shape the way Bury sources and provides good food for all. The Partnership delivers and supports a wide variety of good food movement, awareness raising and inclusive activities. The following is an example of this work.

The Partnership saw the potential in a promotional campaign that framed Healthy Start usage as supporting local families and supporting the local economy, through being redeemed directly with small local businesses. Bury Market, as our flagship local food space, embraced promoting Healthy Start. Bringing this valuable nutritional safety net to Bury Market has been beneficial to everyone involved. Bury has experienced increases locally in uptake despite the eligibility shrinking nationally, demonstrating the success of promotional strategies and partnership working. Healthy Start uptake in Bury has increased to 69 % (June 2024) and is higher than the national average of 66.1%. The momentum generated has been immensely rewarding, observing a ripple effect as regional partnerships are replicating Healthy Start in markets within their own areas.

Councillor Tamoor Tariq, Bury’s cabinet member for health and wellbeing, said: “We are immensely proud of the strong connectivity and achievements of the cross-sector Bury Food Partnership in strengthening our local food system, and that this has been recognised by the national Sustainable Food Places Silver award.”

Leon Ballin, the Sustainable Food Places Programme Manager, said:

“Bury Food Partnership has shown just what can be achieved when creative and committed people work together to make healthy and sustainable food a defining characteristic of where they live. While there is still much to do and many challenges to overcome, Bury Food Partnership has helped to set a benchmark for the other 100+ members of the UK Sustainable Food Places Network to follow. They should be very proud of the work that they have been doing to transform our collective food culture and food system for the better.”

-Ends-

Notes to editors

The Sustainable Food Places programme is a partnership between the Soil Association, Food Matters and Sustain. It is funded by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundationand the National Lottery Community Fundand supports places to transform food culture.

The Sustainable Food Places programme work across six key areas:

1. Taking a strategic and collaborative approach to good food governance and action

2. Building public awareness, active food citizenship and a local good food movement

3. Tackling food poverty, diet related ill-health and access to affordable healthy food

4. Creating a vibrant, prosperous, and diverse sustainable food economy

5. Transforming catering and procurement and revitalizing local supply chains

6. Tackling the climate and nature emergency through sustainable food and farming and an end to food waste.

For more information about Sustainable Food Places visit https://www.sustainablefoodplaces.org/ or @FoodPlacesUK @sustainablefoodplaces #sustainablefoodplaces