The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, hailed the capital’s dedicated and talented legion of food and drink producers at tonight’s Urban Food Awards.
Some of the city’s brightest and best producers are celebrating after being selected top of their individual categories in the third annual marker event for the very best food and drink produced by London companies with 50 employees or fewer.
The group of locally-based producers were crowned at an awards event at the capital’s world famous Borough Market on Wednesday night, recognising their outstanding contributions to London’s food scene.
Thousands of Londoners voted for their top growers, products and retailers at the Urban Food Awards, which is organised by City Hall, Borough Market and London Food Link. A panel of judges including chefs Tom Hunt, Rowley Leigh and Oliver Rowe and food writer Olia Hercules had the enviable task of whittling down the shortlist in 11 food and drink categories.
This year, the new Mayor presented a brand new award recognising the innovative use of surplus food. The Best Surplus Food Initiative award recognises excellent work being done by producers to avoid food waste, in a city where the Evening Standard’s campaign Food for London has shown 875,000 Londoners worry about where their next meal is coming from.
The award was won by Gourmet Goat, which uses surplus goat meat from dairy farms, vine leaves from Forty Hall Vineyard in Enfield and other surplus products to make delicious eastern Mediterranean-style dishes.
Sadiq Khan said: “I salute the breadth and expertise of the huge numbers of Londoners producing and growing the very best food and drink and it’s fantastic to see their entrepreneurship flourishing in our great city.
“It was a privilege to present the Best Surplus Food Initiative award – it’s a tragedy that so much food goes wasted in the capital when some Londoners are going hungry every day and I’m delighted that Gourmet Goat and the other nominees are tackling the problem in such a creative and effective way.”
Other winners on the night included the Food Assembly, who won the Best Retailer category, after building a community network of 12,000 members in London buying fresh food directly from local farmers and producers.
Growing Communities – a Hackney-based social enterprise – won Roots to Work for using their own farms to grow food for a vegetable scheme to teach people how to grow and cook local organic food. The winners of Capital Growth’s Growing Enterprise were Forty Hall Community Vineyard after its first release of wine for sale to the public.
Gourmet Goat collected its second award of the night after scooping Sustainable Street Food, while Bee Collective picked up Most Inspiring Producer for providing a honey extraction service to London beekeepers and volunteering opportunities.
Donald Hyslop, Chair of Trustees of Borough Market said: London’s food and drink scene is more diverse than it has ever been—you can see this every day as Borough Market’s traders set out their stalls for the day—and it is these people who make this city such a compelling place to eat and drink who we are celebrating at the Urban Food Awards. This is a city whose food scene crackles with innovation and ambition, a place where people are throwing themselves into the production of food with an energy and enthusiasm that can’t help but drag you along with it.”
Chris Young of London Food Link said: “As the voice for good food in the capital, London Food Link is delighted each year to help run the Urban Food Awards in order to celebrate the best of the food grown, made, cooked and saved right here on our doorstep, and the inspirational people behind the enterprises doing so.”