Members | Sustainable Food Places

Leicester's Food Plan

Leicester’s Food Plan sets a clear vision to make Leicester a healthy and sustainable food city. It focusses on:

enabling people to make better food choices to support better health outcomes
working to combat food poverty
encouraging a thriving and sustainable food economy
working with industry to reduce its environmental impact.

The plan builds on the success of the first plan and has six ambitions to:

Support healthier food choices
Tackle food poverty - improving access to good food for all
Build food confident communities
Promote a diverse, vibrant and responsible food economy
Transform food procurement and catering
Promote sustainable food and address the climate emergency

This ambitious strategy is supported by an action plan containing 80 clear actions that we as a city partnership will undertake to achieve our ambitions. This action plan will be reviewed and refreshed annually.

Governance

The Food Plan Board is a partnership involving representatives from Leicester City Council, the voluntary and community sector and the business community. The Board will monitor the progress of the ambitions of the Food Plan.

What we do

Since 2014 key achievements include:

An established cross sector Food Plan Board facilitating partnership work to address ambitions
An active and founding member of Sustainable Food Places Network
Supporting Healthier Food Choices – the development of a healthy weight strategy for children and young people moving to a whole systems approach
Support to schools to increase positive healthy eating behaviours, knowledge about nutrition and increased cooking and growing skills
Support to early years settings to provide healthy, balanced meals and snacks for under 5’s and their families through “Eat Better, Start Better”. To date over 100 settings have engaged in the programme and 39 settings have achieved the ‘Good Nutrition for Under 5’s’ award
Improved support to breastfeeding mums so that by 6-8 weeks, 58% of mums are still breastfeeding.
Improved food standards for Leicester City Council school dinners serving fresher, healthy, ethical food using some local and organic ingredients though the Silver Food for Life Served Here accreditation award
Development of the holiday food programme through collaborative partnership working providing over 32,000 meals to 1,900 children in 2019 which has been grounding for HAF funding 2021.
Initial development of work to address health and sustainability in food and drinks sector in conjunction with Leicestershire County
Development of successful food growing programme supporting over 60 community groups and 70 schools in the city, linking with allotments and developing social prescribing opportunities in key areas.

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Contact

Sue Holden
https://www.leicester.gov.uk/your-council/policies-plans-and-strategies/environment-and-sustainability/leicester-s-food-plan/
foodplan@leicester.gov.uk

Get involved

We are developing a communicatons plan and are keen to share any good news so please contact foodplan@leicester.gov.uk for further information.