Sustainable food hubs and food system resilience: Plugging gaps or forging the way ahead?

The UK has a diverse range of sustainable food hubs, sitting at the heart of local or regional food systems throughout the country, and operated by people skilled at sourcing and distributing food within their localities. Potentially, they could offer an important layer of resilience to the UK’s food system in times of crisis – whether from stresses such as climate change or shocks such as Brexit or the Ukraine war. This was put to the test during the Covid-19 pandemic, which revealed both the strengths and the weaknesses of food hubs. For this Discussion Paper, we asked food hub operators what role they see their hubs playing in national emergency food planning and food system resilience. They all said they could play a big part – but that ongoing struggles to stay in business undermine their ability to withstand shocks. This represents a weak link in UK food resilience. For the hubs to be strong and flexible enough to be able to stretch in times of future crisis, they need enlightened, enabling policy and infrastructure to be put in place now.

Natalie Neumann is a research assistant at the Food Research Collaboration. She completed a PhD on urban food governance, equity and farmers’ markets at the Centre for Food Policy in 2022. Her educational background includes an MSc in Molecular Medicine at Maastricht University, Netherlands and an MSc in Global Health at UCL, UK. Prior to her PhD in food policy, she worked in global health NGOs and at the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL), Germany.

Dr Rosalind Sharpe is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Food Policy at City, University of London, where her research interests include food policy and governance, and the sustainability of the UK’s industrial and local food supply systems. She is Director of the Food Research Collaboration.