Nigel Baker and Eleanor Hoad came up with the idea of Urban Harvest, a community juice and preserves business, after years of witnessing surplus fruit go to waste in gardens across the Birmingham, Sutton and Solihull.
Their new enterprise will see tonnes of apples, pears and plums transformed into juice, jam and chutney to be consumed by the people who donated their fruit to the scheme in the first place, and sold through farmers’ markets, shops and restaurants throughout the city.
The scheme, a social enterprise, has been designed to be commercially viable as well as environmentally beneficial, and has received startup funding from the UnLtd Millennium Awards Scheme through UnLtd, a national charity that supports social entrepreneurs.
Nigel, a food and environment campaigner, said: “Eating seasonal, healthy produce which has been locally sourced, eliminating thousands of air and road miles, will be a great thing for the city. It’s crucial that we’re not only about sustainable living, but that we can show others that projects like ours are also financially sustainable in their own right.”
Eleanor Hoad added: “A city as big as Birmingham is like a scattered orchard with mature fruit trees in many gardens. So much of this fruit goes to waste. Urban Harvest takes a common sense approach. Let’s eat the fruit we have in our gardens instead of flying it in from halfway around the world. And best of all, it tastes great too!
“It’s a genuinely local scheme. All the fruit will be harvested from within the city, bottled initially down the road at Pershore College and then sold within Birmingham, so keeping transportation and waste to a minimum. After the first season, we’re planning to set up our own artisan juicing and bottling facility in the city.”
Longer-term, the initiative, which has won the backing of Friends of the Earth and Localise West Midlands, aims to provide placements for people who haven’t had the opportunity to work for some time.
Local apple, pear and plum tree owners are being invited to sign up to the scheme and are being encouraged to take up the option of an annual fee entitling them to ‘buy back’ bottles of juice and jars of chutney and jam produced by fruit from their own and their neighbours’ gardens.
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