We have had a busy six months at Sunny Soups, with lots of exciting developments. The project is now jointly run and funded by The Ridge, a charity in Dunbar who have managed it for almost three years, and the Crunchy Carrot. In November a community buy-out was completed to save this much-loved greengrocer and whole-foods shop for Dunbar High Street, and the fundraising included the employment of a Development Officer. This role now encompasses the delivery of Sunny Soups: for years the Crunchy Carrot have donated their short-dated produce to our programme to cut the shop’s food waste, so it’s great to have Sunny Soups become an official part of their community waste-reduction strategy.
We ended 2019 by filling two freezers to bursting with 64 pots of minestrone soup, bringing the total weight of food saved over the past six months to 550kg. Soups have included parsnip, ginger & apple; roast pepper & carrot; Thai carrot & lentil among many many more. We have also stocked the freezer with stewed fruit ranging from apples to passion fruit, pots of freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, and scores of scones.
We are benefitting from weekly donations from East Lothian Produce of vegetables that don’t fit the supermarket grade; as a result our figures of food made into soups or distributed to volunteers or Dunbar Basics Bank (our town’s food bank) have increased considerably. On our busiest week recently we got through 61.5kg of surplus fruit and veg!
Sunny Soups, The Ridge and the Crunchy Carrot (officially now named the Community Carrot) recently featured in a video on The Guardian’s ‘Anywhere but Westminster’ blog: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/video/2019/dec/10/anywhere-but-westminster-scotland-fear-and-lothian-on-the-campaign-trail-video, giving a taste of how important all three are to our town.
