Community Cupboard

Community cupboard (pantry)

Piloted back in 2016 as a partnership project with Fareshare Yorkshire, ECO launched Doncaster’s first Community Cupboard. Formed as a stepping stone from emergency food parcels, this service offers households the opportunity to register as a community cupboard member and access chilled, frozen, and ambient shopping once a week for £5, with the average weekly shop retailing at over £40, saving each member over £35 per week on their shopping.

The food used within the community cupboard is thousands of tonnes of food that Fareshare Yorkshire has intercepted and their team distributes this food to hundreds of community food members at a heavily discounted price. As a community food member, ECO benefits from this with weekly deliveries of food that would otherwise be destined for landfill, and from these deliveries we can offer this food to households within our community again for a heavily subsidised fee. Our community cupboard currently feeds over 400 people per week and is making a huge impact on feeding bellies and not bins.

Our community cupboard is accessible to everyone and application forms to register as a member are available from our office.