Community Food Centres (CFC) are independently owned and run local diners serving meals. They are funded through a central grant programme that is administered by local councils. £330,000 a year is budgeted per CFC, as well as per meal compensation for £2.50 per adult meal and £2 per child’s meal.
There is likely to be substantial overlap with Service Hubs (estimated at a third), and where it makes sense they share a single facility for a postcode. In such cases, the facility would receive both the Service Hub and the CFC annual grants, providing £605,000 a year to cover fixed costs and labour. This will be enough to ensure that even the most sparsely populated 20% of postcodes can establish a meaningful community presence. Beyond postcodes, the scaling factor for CFC grants will be three per 20,000 population, enabling a network of CFCs in densely populated areas to provide all week coverage with co-ordinated five-day opening schedules.
The CFC channel is expected to create employment for 54,000 staff and restore 2,400 closed pubs and restaurants to use per year. It is predicted that 95% of the venues will be existing commercial kitchens that can be re-opened. At steady state, the CFC network is expected to be twice the size, per capita, of the British Restaurants network started during WWII.
CFCs are targeted to provide one quarter of all the meals across all the NFS channels and consume half of the total NFS budget. The reason CFCs receive a higher share of spending is the important role they play in strengthening social fabric, and as an investment in resilience – providing a network of food facilities and local supply chains that buttress society against future shocks.