Ready, steady, veg!
Helping people enjoy more fruit & veg through community cooking
April 2025
Project overview
Dialling up the veggie part of our diets is one impactful way to take environmental action, and it’s good for our health and pockets too.
Hubbub was excited to team up with innocent drinks and LOVE Food CIC (part of the Community Fridge Network) to share simple, tasty and affordable veggie recipes and help people enjoy more fruit and veg in their daily lives.
With the support of innocent drinks, we funded a series of fruit and veg focussed cooking sessions taking place at LOVE Food CIC, St Thomas Community Food Hub in Exeter, Devon. The sessions were designed to encourage the local community to incorporate more portions of fruit and veg into their diets.
Our target was to help people access and enjoy over 300 portions of fruit and veg alongside encouraging confidence in cooking fruit and veg that people may otherwise struggle with.
Impact
Two cooking courses were held at LOVE Food CIC, St Thomas Community Food Hub in Exeter, Devon over February and March 2025. Each course ran for 3 weeks reaching 19 adults plus 4 children in total.
441 fruit and vegetable portions were cooked and eaten (in line with the NHS 5-a-day portion sizes
100%* agreed positively to the statements below and…
92% strongly agreed that they feel more confident in preparing meals with fruit and veg after attending the course
58% strongly agreed that the classes had a positive impact on their wellbeing.
66% strongly agreed that they now plan to eat more fruit and vegetables.
50% strongly agreed that they now plan to eat more plant-based foods.
And 100% would recommend the Ready, Steady, Veg classes to others
*Based on the 12 participants that responded to the post-course survey.
Quotes from participants
The key benefits for participants were the opportunity to learn new cooking skills with new ingredients in a positive, social atmosphere, allowing them to make new connections and change their attitudes towards food waste and veg-rich dishes.
The food we had lunch was delicious, varied and very nutritious - [it] really opened my eyes as to what can be done with vegetables.”
I loved being creative making food with - and eating it! Delicious wonderful togetherness I really enjoyed it!”
Getting to try different foods and different methods of cooking with them that I had not tried. All lovely, fresh and tasty and using up food waste.”
for delicious, really as done creative and with other people Delicious and togetherness. it!”
Everyone was very friendly, learnt new recipes and got to sit down and eat a delicious lunch with others. So impressed that we ate 30 different healthy ingredients in one meal.”
Like most people I suppose I tend to eat too much ultra processed food & when I do cook, I tend to cook the same things over & over. After attending the Ready Steady Veg classes I now have more confidence to try out some whole food plant-based recipes. I plan to try cooking with tempeh again too!” different different cooking had lovely, and waste.”
Quotes from staff
The organisers at LOVE CIC also felt these benefits, with leftover fruit & veg from the community fridge being used to make the dishes:
This was a really series of classes seemed to be very enjoyed and appreciated. It would be great people to have access these sorts of classes.”
valuable that very much appreciated. for more access to classes.”
We all cooked together and people worked in pairs, so this meant we could cook a wider variety of dishes, and it also makes for a much more sociable class experience. We also all eat together at the end of the session, so by the end of the course participants had got to know each other quite well.”
The ability to use up vegetables leftover in the community fridge [worked well] and encouraged people to use this flexible approach to cooking at home to reduce food waste.”
It was great to have the focus on including as many vegetables in the dishes as possible... this is how I normally cook but it was good to put a focus on this for other and the whole group were really engaged with this. It was also great that the classes had such a range of ages, from young children to older adults.”
Recipes
A huge variety of delicious fruit and veg recipes were cooked over the course of the sessions, including:
Buddha bowl
Banana cake with chocolate mousse
Creamy miso veggie ramen with tempeh
Ribollita soup and chickpea frittatas
Smoothie bowls Jackfruit carnitas with black beans, cauliflower, green-pea guacamole and rainbow slaw
Roasted vegetable and chickpea curry with salad
Tabbouleh with dips and roasted cauliflower salad
Root vegetable and apricot cake
Mains Desserts
Banana with chocolate mousse
Dark chocolate orange & cardamom brownies
Smoothie bowls
Root vegetable apricot cake
Carrot, banana and date loaf
Pear, dark chocolate & hazelnut crumble
Thank you and next steps
A huge ‘thank you’ to innocent drinks who supported this activity and LOVE CIC. We would also like to thank local Labour MP Steve Race who joined one of the sessions.
To scale the impact of ‘Ready, Steady, Veg!’, we’re creating a recipe book packed full of veg-rich recipes for other groups in the Community Fridge Network to use with their communities.
