Leicester's Food Plan

Leicester’s Food Plan sets out how we can make Leicester a healthy and sustainable food city - where the availability and production of good food supports better health, stronger communities and a successful economy – whilst reducing the environmental impact.

Vision

The 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.

Six ambitions

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

1. Support healthier food choices – helping people to make better food decisions throughout life for better health and wellbeing
2. Tackle food poverty - improving access to good food for all
3. Build food confident communities - connecting communities to understand and develop skills around good food
4. Promote a diverse, vibrant and responsible food economy - working with businesses to provide a good food offer for the city
5. Transform food procurement and catering - supporting organisations and businesses to make good food buying and production decisions
6. Promote sustainable food and address the climate emergency - supporting a shift towards a sustainable food system which addresses the climate emergency facing us, along with declining biodiversity and food and packaging waste

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.

Our commitments achieved between 2014 and 2016

• support for at least nine more community food and horticulture projects
• at least 3900m2 of new allotments
• help for families, children’s centres, nurseries and schools including healthy nutrition and cooking skills sessions
• support for food businesses
• looking at the health and sustainability of the food we buy.

Contact us

If you’ve got questions or want to discuss Leicester’s food plan, you can contact the public health team:

• Email foodplan@leicester.gov.uk 

Access further services

• Change4Life - Advice on eating well, moving more and living longer.
• NHS Choices - Includes advice on healthy eating, healthy recipes, food safety and losing weight.
• Allotments - Request a plot or find out more.
• Sustainable Food Cities Network - Leicester is one of the founding members of the UK Sustainable Food Cities Network. This website provides information about what’s going on across the network.