Bring Bags of Taste to Sunderland

The local economy

On average, our participants could save approximately £25 a week by cooking from scratch instead of purchasing takeaway and/or convenience foods (average weekly spend £30). If each household makes a saving of £1300 a year, then thats a whopping annual saving of £156,000 across all participants. This is an excellent return on the £11,000 cost to deliver the courses.

Volunteering, jobs & education

We created three regular volunteer roles to help locally with this project. 36 volunteers were from nationwide network of trained home cooking mentors.

Activity, health and leisure

Here is a selection taken from our case studies. N is a single parent, foster carer. She has fibromyalgia so finds preparing meals a physical challenge. She was referred by the local Change4life team. She wanted to take part to find easier and quicker ways to cook healthy food with her family as they can rely on convenience foods. As a single parent, not in employment, money is also a concern. The biggest gain for the family is that the children learned new skills and enjoyed helping. The children grew in self-confidence because they had contributed to cooking tasty for the family. Spending quality time together was an added bonus as the recipes were also quickly to make. K was recommended to take part by a friend. She is a young woman on UC due to her mental health and long term sickness. She lives with dad, and she can't cook at all but is motivated to learn to cook. She was willing to try new foods even though she doesn’t eat any vegetables. She would spend approximately £100 a week on takeaway food, and when she couldn’t afford that, she would eat 1-minute noodles that cost approx 30p a packet. She lives in an area that is classed as a food desert. K found the course to be helpful with her learning about foods and different ingredients. She has certainly learned cooking skills as she could not cook at all. Her confidence grew as she was getting positive feedback from her father. Since taking part in the course, she is finding new recipes to make too and will buy more vegetables to add to her meals. Compared to National Bags of Taste Stats, we found -88% of participants cooked more frequently after taking part in a Bags of Taste course -85% said that they feel more confident to cook -86% of people identified ways of reducing food costs -92% of all students completed the course