Food for London: Deliciously Ella signs up to our food waste campaign

The blogger and entrepreneur jumps on board a Felix Project van and finds the  charity is going from strength to strength. Lizzie Edmonds and David Cohen report
Deliciously Ella joins the Felix Project delivery van and helps deliver food
Alex Lentati

On a grey and drizzly afternoon, Ella Mills — otherwise known as Deliciously Ella, social media sensation, food blogger and health entrepreneur — stood in a delivery bay at Sainsbury’s dressed, ever so glamorously, in a high-vis jacket.

As she hauled a crate stuffed full of pak choi, butternut squash, kale, beetroot, grapefruits and oranges — all past their sell-by date and otherwise destined for the bin — into the back of a Felix Project van, she joked: “This is great, I am really working on my strength.”

With the boxes loaded up, Ella, 25, took a moment to rummage through the food — all items she regularly uses in her blog and top-selling books.

“It’s good stuff,” said Ella, whose plant-based, gluten-free and dairy-free recipes have secured her almost a million Instagram followers. “It makes no sense that it would be chucked away. It is all absolutely fine.”

Alex Lentati

On the way to The Felix Project warehouse, Ella — daughter of Labour politician Shaun Woodward and supermarket heiress Camilla Sainsbury — was brought up to speed on Felix, our campaign flagship charity which takes surplus food and delivers it to organisations helping London’s poor.

Food for London campaign

What is it?
This £1.6 million initiative seeks to redistribute surplus food to tackle hunger.

What are we doing?
1. Backing the scale-up of The Felix Project — our flagship charity — which collects surplus produce from food suppliers and delivers it to a range of charities that provide meals for those in need.
2. Awarding grants of up to £20,000 each to charities, community groups or social enterprises tackling food waste and/or using fresh food to address food poverty. Applications have closed.

Who are our backers? 
We have raised £1.25 million for Felix including from Citi, Sainsbury’s, Lush founders Mark and Mo Constantine, the Evening Standard Dispossessed Fund, Uber, Fortnum & Mason and the Felix Byam Shaw Foundation, which has pledged to match money raised for The Felix Project with up to £750,000. 

The £350,000 grants programme is funded by Citi, D&D London and the Dispossessed Fund.

“That is really amazing,” she said. “Such a simple idea. Often the most simple are the best.”

This year the blogger married Matthew Mills, son of Tessa Jowell. The couple have expanded her blog and recipe book empire by opening two MaE Delis, one in Marble Arch, the other in Mayfair. A third, in Covent Garden, is scheduled to open soon.

She said keeping food waste to a minimum had been one of their biggest challenges: “The hardest thing is achieving balance between what the customer wants and not being wasteful.

“We have big bowls of salad on sale every day. It is against our ethos to fill them up at 8.30pm when we close at 9pm. Yet when a customer walks in, they get upset if there is none of that particular salad left or if they can’t get one of our brownies.” Her deli is “as zero waste as possible”, she said. “There is more we can do for certain and that is what we are working towards.”

Ella said she wholeheartedly supported Sainsbury’s unprecedented decision to release its food waste figures to the Evening Standard as part of our campaign: “I think clarity is best, so if other organisations can share how much they waste, they should.”

Back at the Felix warehouse in Park Royal, west London, manager Anne Elkins was in exuberant mood as she showed Ella around. “It’s been crazy amazing here since the Standard launched the campaign in September,” she said. “Our warehouse has doubled to 2,400 sq ft, we have doubled our full-time staff to four, gone from one to three vans and been inundated with hundreds of people wanting to volunteer.”

She smiled. “We had 350 emails on the first day so it was manic and intense and really exciting. We were reeling and playing catch-up for weeks, but it’s a nice problem to have. We had to bring in new volunteers, train them, reply to the hundreds of charities and food suppliers who wanted to join our network and still carry on business as usual.

Alex Lentati

“We made sure to get back to everyone who got in touch. Sometimes we had a dozen new volunteers all starting on the same day and all had to be introduced and trained. We have trained more than 100 volunteers in two months, and we will be doing a lot more of that in the future, with courses on food handling, forklift truck driving and van driving in the offing.”

She showed us round the warehouse, which was fairly groaning with surplus food — apples, pineapples, strawberries, raspberries, grapes, mushrooms, peppers, potatoes, milk, pallets of pasta and bags of artisan bread from bakery Paul. A second chiller had been delivered as a flat-pack and was waiting to be assembled.

At one point, Ella spotted a crate of chopped tomatoes and kidney beans donated by Mr Organic that could not be sold because the cans were dented. “I can’t believe that,” Ella said. “I know producers can’t sell dented tins, but seeing how much is here, it’s mad. I’m pleased though that Felix is getting this food to people who need it because we shouldn’t have it going to waste.”

The warehouse bustled with new volunteers. Claire Lloyd Davies, 59, signed up three weeks ago after reading about Felix in the Standard. “I thought, food waste, what a fantastic cause,” she said. “Now I come down twice a week to help out and I love it. It’s friendly, everybody’s here to do good and it’s great fun. I mainly go out as a driver’s mate collecting from stores. We always get a great welcome because they are so pleased to see their surplus food going to a good cause.”

John Appleton, 76, volunteers four mornings a week since he was made redundant in October. “I read about Felix when I picked up a copy of the Standard at my dentist while I was waiting for root canal treatment,” he said.

Nick Clifton quit his job to become a full-time employee of the Felix Project after reading about the campaign in the Standard. “I am the warehouse co-ordinator,” he said. “I wanted to do something that mattered with my life. I’m so pleased Anne took me on.”

Deliciously Ella - in pictures

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Felix will soon be expanding, said Anne. “We are currently a five-day-a-week operation but will be going to seven days soon. It’s all systems go here. It’s been one hell of a ride. And we are only just beginning.”

The future could also include Ella. “I would love to come back and volunteer,” she told Anne. “One hundred per cent, sign me up.”

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