A Slice of Bread and Butter
The voice of The Bread and Butter Thing - with stories from the frontline of the cost of living crisis from one of the UK's leading food charities.
A Slice of Bread and Butter
Barfoots of Botley and surplus veg
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“Food waste” is often just food that lost its label, its looks, or its moment. We sit down with Steve Brown, Head of Customer Technical at Barfoots (and sustainability lead for factory operations), to get specific about what surplus means inside a major UK fresh produce grower and packer, and why the route from field or factory to plate is shaped as much by definitions as by lorries.
We talk about Barfoots’ farming roots and what it takes to supply vegetables across seasons by following the sun through the UK, Spain and Senegal. Then we get into the messy middle: anaerobic digestion for inedible by-product, and the grey area where edible produce can still end up as “waste”. Steve breaks down streams like sweetcorn husks (truly inedible) versus sweet potato and butternut offcuts that are perfectly fine to eat, plus tenderstem broccoli leaves and mixed-colour chillies that fail cosmetic standards but not flavour, safety or nutrition.
From there, we zoom out to the policy and measurement problem. Pre-farm gate food waste is hard to count when harvests are multi-pass and “cut and drop” can be plant husbandry rather than negligence. We explore mandatory food waste reporting, the cultural nature of “edible vs inedible”, and why language matters because what we call waste often becomes waste. The thread that holds it together is simple: redistribution works when relationships make it easy, low-cost and reliable for surplus food to go to people who need it, especially as the cost of living squeezes household budgets.
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Welcome And What We Do
SPEAKER_00Hello and welcome back to a slide of bread and butter with me, Vic and Munk. We're from the Bread and Butter Thing.
SPEAKER_01We run a network of mobile food clubs that take step its food from supermarkets, farms and factories. We take it straight into communities where families are struggling to get money.
SPEAKER_00For less than a ton of our members get bags packed with fruit, veg, fridge food, and cupboard staples. It's a weekly shop that helps stretch the budget and take some of the pressure off.
SPEAKER_01Yep, and our members are at the heart of everything we do. They turn food into friendship and neighbours into community, and that's what makes us tick.
SPEAKER_00And today we're chatting to Steve from Barfoot.
Meet Barfoots And Their Crops
SPEAKER_02Hi, I'm Steve Brown. I'm head of customer technical at Barford's and Botley. My team and I manage Barfoot's relationships with our customers from a food safety and quality perspective, but I'm also the sustainability lead for factory operations and onwards. So what do Barfoots do, Steve? So we started many things by the sounds of that. Well, a few things. We do them well. We started as a farm. This is actually our 50th year. So started farming down on the South Coast. And we started by supplying back in the 70s corgettes into MS. Back then corgettes were like a novel and semi-exotic kind of vegetable. When ratatouille was trendy. Well, when ratatouille was trendy and when avocados were called avocado pears, just about old enough to remember. So yeah, I mean you have to introduce these things to a suspicious public somehow, don't you? Um that's how we started with corgettes, and then we identified that I say we, it's all down to our founder and owner, Peter Barfett, that we've got a fairly unique climate down here on the South Coast, lots of sunshine, rainfall is just about right. You've got a good range of soils for growing different crops. Our main crop now is sweet corn. We do the majority of the UK's fresh sweet corn. We also grow asparagus, chilies, tender stem broccoli. We've also got operations out in Spain, run by Peter's daughter. And we've also got a joint venture out in Senegal that also grows an awful lot of chilies and sweet corn for us, too. Because really, what you're doing is following the sun. You're following the seasons. Exactly that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I guess you are what some of the retailers would describe as a category king, because you can supply those products 50 odd weeks a year, you're right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Courjet's is a big one both in the UK and out of Spain. We supply an awful lot of sweet potatoes. Butternut squash. We tend to specialise in they call it semi-exotic veg.
SPEAKER_01I met Johnny Bar thought it was a time when you guys were also doing a bit of speciality on farm anaerobic digestion
Anaerobic Digestion And True Waste
SPEAKER_01stuff.
SPEAKER_02Uh yes, so we do have an anaerobic digester on site that our food waste goes into. Because we sell sweet corn with the husks and the silks removed and sort of the tips and the butts cut off by virtue of getting it to something that people can eat, you're generating quite a large quantity that you can't eat.
SPEAKER_01This is the rubber of the food waste sector, right? Waste is waste, but some of it's edible and some of it's inedible. Yes. And the inedible things absolutely should go to AD. It's the edible stuff that's more controversial, shall we say. But even trying to define it's bloody hard, right? Yes.
SPEAKER_02Well, we we defined it as as inedible parts. By which I mean nobody is going to eat the husks off of a sweet corn. I mean that'd just be like trying to chew through a sheet of paper. It's not nice. And frankly, there isn't any nutrition in it for you to be knobbing through anyway. So why bother? If we could have sold it but you didn't, and it's now rotten, that's food waste because it could have had a home at some point. Yeah. We tend to follow the rap guidance.
SPEAKER_01Tell me about what you guys are doing with bread and butter thing
The Aldi Link And Veg Rubble
SPEAKER_01and how that came about.
SPEAKER_02It started with a conversation with Aldi, where we were just giving an overview of our um sustainability activities. It wasn't much more than a point on a slide, really, where we were talking about what we do with food waste and who we work with. We'd done a piece of work under the Coronation Food Project or Alliance Food Sourcing, as it's now called, where we'd identified a waste stream, like a byproduct from our prep factory of um the sort of little bits of grayed-out pieces that come when you try dicing a sweet potato or a butternut squash. This is what you were calling earlier rubble. Yeah, that's it. Yes, yeah. So the attractively named butternut and sweet potato rubble. Uh, because it is just lots of little shrapnel-y bits and bits. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01I was gonna say it's perfectly edible, and as long as you cook it all together rather than with the bigger dice bits, correct, then you can control it.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Rather than just making mash out of it or just making soup out of it, our MPD team pulled together like a little recipe book. Nice. And that included stuff as out there as chocolate brownies with it in. Oh wow. Genuinely delicious. Because they're both quite sweet vegetables. It's not a massive leap from a carrot cake, is it? No. Where was this rubble going beforehand? It was going into the AD. We were collecting it so that we wouldn't be knee-deep in it by the end of the day. You can't just let everything pile up on the floor. It knows eating something. All we did was collect it over the course of a day. We then take those and we put them into raw material boxes. So boxes that raw material comes into the business, we then decap them out to usually the sweet potatoes, in fact.
SPEAKER_01There's a nice bit of circularity going on here, isn't there?
SPEAKER_02Exactly. And this caught the attention of a chap called Neil Jones, who's one of the sustainability leads at Aldi. And he was like, That's it really interesting. Can I bring this chap, Justin Pritchard, down? I'm like, Yeah, sure. And Justin is your Justin from the bread and butter thing. Yeah. They came down and we walked round and we had a look at different opportunities of how we could maybe work together. We were stood next to a line that was grading tender stem broccoli. It being a natural product, you get some bits that have uh taken the transportation better than others. The more beat up bits come out, and then you get quite a lot of leaves on the sides, which um are entirely edible but not necessarily visually appealing, and they do kind of interfere a bit with the packing, so there's a few reasons to take those out. But Justin was like, Great, we'll we can take that if you can collect it for us. Well, what we did was get a thing called a cardboard palatana, so it's roughly a one-meter cube cardboard box again, that we get raw material comes in in those. So we just stuck one of those next to the normal skip, and then everything that's from these tender stem crates pop into that box, then your haulier comes and collects it and takes it away.
SPEAKER_01But again, I would imagine, Steve, it's the same principle, right? It's like relatively low cost to you to be able to just do it that way. Yeah, unless you had to ship it to us.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, exactly. The beauty of what the bread and butter thing does is that where stuff has gone past that level of freshness, because you'll move it through your supply chain so fast, it's a great outlet. And we take other things like where we've got sort of colouration defects and things like that, especially on chilies, because they tend to start one colour and then become another. A whole rainbow colour. Camouflage, should we say? Although green at one end and red at the other, and shades of orange and yellow in the middle. But it's still a chili. It's still a chili, it'll still set your mouth on fire, it's still quite exciting. And actually, having something as exotic and reasonably expensive as as produce goes in a per kilo price. If we're sending this pallet container of uh grayed out broccoli to you, if we've got a few crates of that, we'll
Collecting Surplus Without Extra Cost
SPEAKER_02just chuck those on the top as well. So fantastic.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. There's a difficulty around looking at the size of the price for such things when you look at agriculture, Steve, because there's a lot of agricultural sectors that don't actually measure the waste, shall we say? There is. There's a lot of challenge around whether it's resource that's the barrier or that definition of edible, inedible. Where's your thinking on it?
SPEAKER_02If you're talking about the sort of field-level food waste, it's very hard to quantify that. Why do you think that is? For us, a lot of it is down to the nature of the crop. We have a number of crops: asparagus, tendon stem broccoli, corgettes that are kind of multi-pass harvest. So you'll go through it all and then you'll move on to the next field. But then a day or two, a week later, you'll go back through that same field again. Have you wasted anything? Could it have been harvested if I'd gone back a following day? Yeah, no, maybe. I don't know. You do get into a position where some things you have to what you call cut and drop. So you have to harvest some and let it go just to keep the plant in production while you're sort of idle waiting for more orders to come along. You are gonna go back through and get food out of that. So at that point, are you wasting it or is it plant husbandry? Uh, because actually, what you're doing is keeping a a productive, edible plant, productive and edible. To measure it, you'd have to actually collect it all, in which case you've harvested it. And then you're gonna use it. Then, well, now I've collected it. What the hell am I gonna do with that? I don't I don't have a really a need for it. So I suppose you can you there's ways you can take samples, so you can take a like a strip and make an estimate based off of that. But doing that involves a lot of time and resource. Although it doesn't generally feel like that quite a lot of the time, food in this country is very cheap. And the margins on it are way for thin. So am I going to apply a load of resource to finding out how much I haven't sold, or am I going to focus on what has been sold?
SPEAKER_01I would say mandatory food waste reporting is a good thing because then it gives visibility to what edible food is going in the bin. But somebody like yourself would probably say, well, that's fine for factories, but on a farm, you're adding a lot of cost. You are adding an awful lot of cost, yeah. And then you've got all the edible and inner edible contemplations. So where do you go with it then as well? I I don't know what the size of the prize is pre-farm gate.
SPEAKER_02No, and the reality is nobody really does. And then there's a an element of that even if you do, so what?
SPEAKER_01What would you do? If you were me and you were looking at all this food redistribution and trying to source more pre-farm gate crops, what would be a practical, sensible thing to do? There's the million dollar question for you. That is the million dollar question.
SPEAKER_02You need to identify partners who have pre-farm gate waste in the
Why Farm Food Waste Is Hard
SPEAKER_02first place. You need to strike up a relationship with those people and understand the cycles and what's likely to generate it, and you need to have a model wherein they can identify it and collect it and make an offer of it, which actually is a model that exists and has been monetized to a certain extent. It's all wonky veg type box schemes and things like that. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And then it's it's how do you break the cost equation? Because it would be lovely if industry could absorb the cost, but actually, industry is actively working to not have that cost in the first place. I was gonna say everybody's working to engineer that cost out, really. Absolutely. I mean, there's no point going bankrupt if you're trying to do the right thing. Certainly, in the case of our our working together, our Forts and the bread and butter thing, it's about someone from your side going, but I can take that and I can take it from you. Can you collect it with not a lot of effort? Yeah. You don't know what you can get until you start talking about what you could maybe find.
SPEAKER_01It's the beauty of farm and factory walks because you because you just walk around and and somebody like yourself stays going, Do you want that? Do you want that? Do you want that? That's where the creativity comes, isn't it? And that that's the difficulty for somebody, I guess, that is trying to drive policy or a way of subsidizing it through government or anything. It's just like actually there is a partnership piece there, almost like the handshake to say I've got this. Problem A going into A D. Do you want it? Can we do something about it? And how do we work out the economies on it? Yeah.
SPEAKER_02What funding streams can we tap into to support this? Those sorts of things. It's always down to funding, right? That's the bottom line, I'm afraid, yeah. Quite literally. Yeah. I don't know what expectations Justin carried with him when he came to visit us, but um it was literally that conversation. It's like, well, but we could take that. I I know people who want this. Well, in that case, give us a couple of weeks to figure out how we're gonna collect it for you and uh we'll get on it.
SPEAKER_01So I've been like a pig in the proverbial talking to industry types like Steve because it's been my life for too long talking about food waste and redistribution. So it's it's good to geek out with people like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And show your age with the avocado pears.
SPEAKER_01Why do you not remember them?
SPEAKER_00I don't it wasn't that a 70s thing.
SPEAKER_01You see, we keep coming across this age difference that we really shouldn't be highlighting.
SPEAKER_00Wasn't wasn't it like a 70s thing or like a very early 80s thing?
SPEAKER_01Late 70s, early 80s. And I thought I behaved quite well when he was mentioning the Corgettes as well, because yeah, being a very early adopter of vegetarianism, so I in the 80s I was a veggie and always have been since, it was kind of tricky because every restaurant you went to and you said you were veggie, all you got was bloody ratatouille.
SPEAKER_00I know that you've been known to be a bit cogetist.
SPEAKER_01I love the phrase, yes, I I I am definitely a courgettist.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you see, I absolutely adore coget, and I've even shared on the podcast and to you, one of my favourite recipes in the past.
SPEAKER_01You have, and I have tried it, and and it is genuinely lovely, and I do like many things that people do in the modern world with cogettes, but I'm scarred from decades of ratatouille pick. That's all it is.
SPEAKER_00Okay, well, we'll move on. We won't want to uh cause you too much PTSD. Yeah, I was quite interested with the food rubble.
SPEAKER_01It's weird, right? We get it as well from others, but it's a proper thing. So if you think about it, if you get something potato shaped and and you try and dice it, you end up with all these little bits around the edges, don't you? And that's the rubble bit that ends up being animal feed, A D, whatever. But it's only because of the size of it, and it goes a bit mushy if you put it in with the bigger
Language Shapes What Gets Saved
SPEAKER_01ones because it boils too quick or gets soft too quick.
SPEAKER_00The name makes it sound really unedible though, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Like I'm trying to rack my brains for a better name than rubble.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But even dust.
SPEAKER_01Some people do use dust as well. So I guess the one that I've seen that works better, broccoli crumb. So when some of the floret comes off and it and it's just some of the floret, right, the very tips, that's crumb.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So it's a better word.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, because there's a lot of kind of if you say it and you say rubble, it just feels like, oh well, that's absolutely not for people.
SPEAKER_01Language matters, doesn't it? You know, they call it waste, and then it ends up as waste.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, but it's not.
SPEAKER_01No. But this is the thing again, it struck me we could have had an entire episode just on edible versus inedible.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It felt like it's edible once we identify it's edible because the way Steve was looking at it and Barfort's look at it was to say, well, we section thing, whatever that product is, that planned, and each bit's edible or inedible, but then it's like have a conversation with somebody like Justin, and suddenly it transfers from inedible to edible. Yeah. And I remember pre-COVID when there were first conversations around mandatory food waste reporting, etc. I was part of the working group with DEFRA trying to work up the definition of edible and inedible.
SPEAKER_00Trying to.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Because you're trying to keep high level. Yeah. So it's really easy for peel and cores and bones and skin. But then where do you go from there? Because there's still lots of other things that are inedible or edible. So I learned last week that you can make a curry from watermelon rind, for example. It's edible. Really? Yeah. Wow. I'll send you the recipe. Don't fancy that. It's like plantain.
SPEAKER_00Also not a fan, but wow. Okay.
SPEAKER_01But you see what I mean? Yeah. It's like whose view of edible is it?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and I guess across different cultures that would vary too, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Well, that's where policy gets super hard, right? Because I know we want mandatory food waste reporting, but the only reason we do is to actually be able to see what is edible that's wasted. And this little definition in the middle that sounds ever so simple is what I feel is standing in the way a lot of it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, we definitely need more transparency around what's going where. And I think actually, even just really simply, if it was edible until it was inedible, that would make a bit of a difference. Like prove you can't eat it rather than prove you can, because you're already putting extra effort in, then, aren't you? It's a bit like opt-in, opt out. Yeah. I don't know how we go about getting that shift. It feels quite a cultural.
SPEAKER_01It really does. Just looking at it as well. And it was nice to be able to talk to a farmer, shall we say? I say in inverted common is but they are farmers. They're an agri agricultural business because they're huge, but they are farmers at heart. And talking to them about how we measure pre-farm gate food waste is really interesting. And you know, it's less like, well, we could do, but what's the benefit? Because actually we have to make commercial decisions all the time, and not only commercial decisions about what we pick and when we pick it, but also do we need a resource to be going around measuring everything that's left in the field? Yeah. Is there a benefit to that to anyone?
SPEAKER_00No, you can really see that. I mean, it's kind of a bit of a Captain Obvious statement, isn't it? But you don't see it until you're picturing it really. That is definitely part of the challenge. We want to be able to be making accessing surplus as easy as possible for people. Yeah. And if you then kind of go in, well, do some funny counting and all of this about it, well, it just makes it harder, doesn't it?
SPEAKER_01It does. It does.
SPEAKER_00What was interesting was Barfoots are doing a great job of working with a number of redistributors through different projects, identifying different solutions for different bits of the process or different crop. And they've got AD. And it's, you know, I think we think about it goes to AD or it gets redistributed. And actually, they're probably thinking about surplus and waste in a quite complex way.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I think they are. And I think their thinking has moved on quite a lot. So I'd met Johnny Boyfoot 10, 15 years ago, and it was at a time when everybody was calling AD alchemy because it was so magical how it was actually recycling and all the rest of it. And people weren't in the thinking it at that point about the fossil fuel output of natural methane gas, etc. Thinking has moved on, and clearly they're keeping up with that thinking, and it's nice to see how they're innovating in that space.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think it's great because they've obviously got their eye on the bottom line, but equally they've got hearts and minds in the right place and wanting to do the right thing. And if we can go in and get the tender stem broccoli and it's pretty easy, then they'd rather it go to people, which is great.
SPEAKER_01Last point, and I always feel that this is a truth. As much as we
Relationships Plus The Cost Of Food
SPEAKER_01can see they're thinking, innovating, and as much as we can see that they're doing the right thing, it's not process, it's still people-driven. It's just in meeting Steve, having a site visit that meant they could have a conversation over a bin of things that was going to go to animal feed or AD.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. And before that, it was Neil at Aldi recognizing that there was something we might be able to support with. So it's people and relationships all the way. Through, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01Yep. This is the thing, however long that carries on, redistribution will always be the kind of poor cousin of AD.
SPEAKER_00I get that, but then I also think that specifically what we're doing by giving really good, nutritious food to members and seeing the difference that it makes and the service standards that we have with suppliers but also with our communities. I think that we will always be in a position where relationships are fundamental for us delivering as much impact as we can.
SPEAKER_01I couldn't agree more. And I and culturally, it's the way it's been all the way through, right? Everything we have done, because there are there are no agreements on redistribution. It's always done through people and trust and relationships. So we're only as good as our relationship and our reputation, right? But I think because it's culturally how we do things, it's end-to-end people and engagement and relationships. It's service levels at both ends, because if we don't do the right thing for Steve and Borfartz, it goes in the too hard category for them.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. So the other thing that I think he was mentioning about food being really cheap, I get that in comparison to, you know, when you look globally, but I also feel it's super topical right now. Isn't it that for many of our members, food is not feeling really cheap. It's you know something that people cut really early on in trying to make ends meet, but then equally it's hugely important to us all to have good, healthy food. You know, I think that means that what we're doing right now is kind of more important, really, and the relationship that we've got with Steve and Barfoot is really essential in making sure that we can do what we can for people.
SPEAKER_01Well, we're recording this in the week where government's asking supermarkets to cap the prices on staples, right?
SPEAKER_00That's a whole episode in itself.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. All I would say on it is I would like to understand what economics they think they want to apply to that. Because no matter what you do, if you cap something, it's only robbing Peter to pay Paul. Somebody's got to pay that additional price and they're gonna put massive pressure on the manufacturing and supply chain to actually reduce the cost, which they've already been doing that forever because that's what the retailers drive them to do as well. And then, well, if we can't cut the price, then it's subsidised and therefore it's just gonna be what? Taxpayers' money paying for it.
SPEAKER_00Well, I've been I've been nerding out to a few interviews on this, you know, like I do on my way into work. And um there's you know a real consensus coming that's like, well, there's we're talking about 10 items and there's like 13,000 items.
SPEAKER_01And then some, yeah. And what's the definition of a loaf of bread?
SPEAKER_00Well, all we're gonna do, well I mean, maybe we uh we pick that up with HOVIS next time. What we uh, you know, basically people are saying, well, it's fine, limit 10 items, and then you know, we're saving 10p on a loaf of bread, so we're adding it to the eggs, yeah, you know, and ultimately it'll shake out the same for people's shopping baskets.
SPEAKER_01I go into my core accountant brain when anybody starts doing this, and I just all I say is somebody's gotta pay for it, so it's not a magical cost that goes away.
SPEAKER_00No, and I go to the my member kind of brain for this and think, do you know what? It's such a big systemic problem right now for people, and people have got literally nothing that capping 10 items makes zero difference to anyone. So, why are we wasting time thinking about a sticking plaster and not doing a proper solution? Because I'm pretty sure if we asked our members, they're gonna be like, Well, it's not gonna make a difference to me.
SPEAKER_01Couldn't agree more. I'm gonna bring you down from your soapbox now and we'll we'll end on a
Thanks, Ways To Join And Subscribe
SPEAKER_01yeah, anyway. Huge thanks to Steve, and he he was good fun. And you definitely got edited highlights, but we did have some interesting conversations further, but not a second episode, it was definitely needed to hit the edit floor. Oh, really?
SPEAKER_00I can imagine, I can imagine. So if you'd like to know more about the bread and butter thing and what we get up to, you can find us at Team TBBT on TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or online at breadandbutterthing.org.
SPEAKER_01And if you have any feedback or thoughts on the podcast or you want to come and have an attack on the podcast and be a guest, drop us an email at podcast at breadandbutthing.org.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and we're always open to new members at all of our hubs. So if you want to join our food scheme or someone that you know does, then please look on our become a member page of the website and find your nearest hub. And just on the uh changing member numbers, we've had over 500 members that used to shop with us and haven't shopped with us for a while coming back to shop again.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00That's my stats of the week.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so the tides are changing, people can see that prices are already going up, and our savvy members are once again planning.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and good for them. Like, I really hope that getting ahead and thinking, right, I'll do bread and butter once a month.
SPEAKER_01Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00And then that'll help me stretch my budget. Cool.
SPEAKER_01And lastly, please do all those things that podcast asks you to do so you can like us, subscribe to us, or you could leave us a review or share us with your mates or chat about us on social, and we will see you next time.
SPEAKER_00See you next time.
