The Food Foundation

How we helped The Food Foundation and their partners show the difference they were making to veg consumption across the UK

Project highlights

System change evaluation
Food justice
Strategic Added Value
Theory of Change
UK-wide
Three year

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The project brief

Peas Please was an ambitious three-year programme to improve the availability, appeal and consumption of vegetables, especially in low-income families and school age children. The programme worked at a number of levels to change the food system, including:

• working with the food production, retail and food service sectors to increase vegetable offers and change meal formulations
• supporting community level activism
• influencing policy

The partners needed an evaluation to help them understand the difference the programme made, and how these changes came about.

Our approach

We designed a formative methodology that examined each workstream individually and the programme as a whole. Our approach needed to change during the Covid-19 pandemic, to reflect the impact of lockdown and seismic shifts in eating habits both in and out of home.

Our evaluation included:

• annual large scale interview programmes with food businesses ranging from global manufacturers to major supermarkets, from small grocers to restauranteurs to school caterers
• interviews with policy makers and key stakeholders within the food system
• analysis of policy influence
• focus groups and interviews with community-based ‘Veg Advocates’
• regular interviews with partners

We used Strategic Added Value as an analytical frame, to articulate how the programme had changed conditions within the system and the unique contribution the programme made alongside other system change actors. In the final year, we also revisited and updated the Theory of Change to reflect the impacts made by the programme and the changing context in which it was now operating.

Sharing our findings

The result

We produced annual reports which made recommendations based on emerging findings. The partners implemented these recommendations each year, to refine and strengthen their approach. In the final year, we made recommendations which will be used to inform the partners’ individual and collective food system change work in future.

It’s time to make confident decisions about the future.

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