Eat It Up Fund
Tackling food waste through innovation
The UK wastes around 10.2 million tonnes of food every year, almost three quarters of it perfectly edible, while more than 1 in 8 households are food insecure (WRAP, 2025; Food Foundation, 2026). Household food waste alone is associated with at least 16 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, and climate shocks are pushing food bills higher still. Despite decades of effort, the problem remains deeply entrenched.
At Hubbub, tackling food waste is central to what we do. Through our Community Fridge Network, Food Connect programme and campaigns like Eat Your Pumpkin, we've seen first-hand how practical, people-centred approaches can shift behaviour and keep good food out of the bin. But we also know that community action alone won't be enough.
What's been missing isn't awareness of the problem. It's the space and funding to test genuinely new approaches, back ideas that haven't been proven yet, and find out what actually works across all the different places food gets wasted. This is why we launched the Eat It Up Fund.
Download the 2026 Eat It Up Fund report.
Radical innovation to cut food waste
The Eat It Up Fund, delivered with funding from Starbucks, provided grants of up to £60,000 to organisations with bold, early-stage ideas to reduce edible food waste.
We weren't looking for safe bets: sensor technology in household fridges alongside chef training in schools; a food processing factory in London alongside behaviour change inside a prison.
The fund created space to test ideas before knowing they’d work, and shared what was learned either way. Because understanding what doesn't work, and why, is just as valuable to moving this agenda forward as celebrating what does.
Catherine David, CEO at WRAP
Food waste projects
Over two rounds between 2024 and 2025, we supported thirteen initiatives across the UK, selected from 1,100 expressions of interest. Our application process was deliberately light — asking only the questions we genuinely needed, offering feedback at every stage, and making space for ideas that were bold but unproven.
The result was one of the most diverse cohorts we've backed: projects rooted in community kitchens, university labs, prison wings, school canteens, and hospitality supply chains. Together they saved over 211 tonnes of food from waste, with a further 886 tonnes forecast in the year ahead. They engaged thousands of people, opened up new commercial routes for surplus food, and generated tools and evidence that others can build on.
- School chefs across 36 Midlands schools cut food waste per pupil by 22% after a ten-week training programme with Chefs in Schools
- Angry Monk built a brand new supply chain for surplus meat and seafood, reaching 60+ hospitality customers
- Newcastle University validated smart fridge sensor technology in real homes
- Big Ideas Company's Clean Plate toolkit is now being shared by HMPPS as a national resource across the UK prison estate
- Zest onboarded 200 food manufacturers onto their AI surplus matching platform, achieving an 87% reduction in edible food waste in a Nestlé factory trial
Read the full stories in our impact reports:
What this tells us
These thirteen projects show that food waste innovation doesn't belong in one sector, one setting, or one type of organisation. The problem is everywhere. So are the opportunities.
Early-stage funding matters. Not because every idea will succeed, but because the ones that do, for example, a prison food waste toolkit now being adopted nationally, a surplus protein method being taken to market, a community mushroom farm that has independently secured its next round of funding, wouldn't exist without someone backing them before the evidence was there.
That's what the Eat It Up Fund was built to do. And we believe it's what moving the food waste agenda forward requires: more experimentation, more honest learning, and more willingness to back innovation.
Collaborate with us
Food waste is one part of a bigger challenge Hubbub is committed to: shifting the way people eat, shop and think about food towards something better for people and the planet.
If you're a business, funder or organisation with an ambition around food waste or sustainable food systems, and you're looking for a creative, evidence-led partner to help you test what's possible, we'd love to hear from you.
Thinking of changing-up something in your own life?
Read our 10 ways to create change.
See Hubbub in action
From Community Fridges that cut food waste to Ballot Bins that halve cigarette litter, our campaigns show what taking action that's good for the environment looks like in practice.