The Food Conversation is the UK’s largest-ever public dialogue about food, beginning with 12 in-depth deliberations taking place across all four UK nations.

Drawing on all the resources developed for these deliberations, FFCC created a free and open-source toolkit to increase the impact and reach of citizen voices on food. This was designed to enable citizens and community to host their own conversations, taking place at different scales and in different places across the UK.

The toolkit significantly scaled-up the project, going beyond the hundreds of people who participated in the deliberations, and demonstrating a nationwide appetite to engage with food as an issue. To date, we have recorded 74 separate community-led conversations taking place, involving 1,279 people, in 45 locations – and the number is increasing all the time, as plans are made and funds raised to host more.

This report details what we’ve learned about community conversations so far – the impact they’re having locally and nationally and how active participation from citizens can help transform the debate on food.