That's a good job well done. By having the actual food to cook with takes of the pressure of knowing your buying the right thing, and the incentive is not seeing it go to waste 👍🏻
Just listened to an interview with the founder of this organisation: https://bagsoftaste.org/
Apparently if you do cooking classes for people (who don’t cook), only 8% of the recipes ever get made again, but if you do cooking classes and then sell people a bag of portioned out ingredients (£3 for four portions) then 89% of them use the ingredients, so now she has a system where they deliver the ingredients and there’s a WhatsApp group with a mentor who gives advice to the members.
Clever idea.
Interview: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002b70s
Participants receive a bag of food to their door with all the ingredients for seven meals, three recipes and all the materials required for to take part in the two week course which is delivered remotely to their phone. Since launching in 2014 Bags of Taste has taught over 14,000 people and delivered 100,000 meals.
Discussion
Yes, absolutely!
Another interesting bit from the interview: they did lots of surveys about why people don’t cook (barriers like: think it costs more, too tired after work, don’t want to risk the kids refusing strange food, already got processed food in the fridge, etc, etc) but a very high proportion wrote in “too lazy” but then went on start cooking after the course + food bags. When she dug into it more, it turned out “too lazy” was code for “I have more than five of the barriers you have identified”.
It's nice to feel vindicated. I worked with a group about 10 years ago working on local food initiatives. This was a suggestion, but it got shot down.
The argument was the people we were "helping" cant afford the ingredients so we shouldn't charge for a food bag.
My argument people dont value free stuff fell on deaf ears.
Wish I'd thought of this approach now 😁