About Better Food Traders

Our Story

Better Food Traders has its roots in Growing Communities, London’s first Community Supported Agriculture scheme, founded in Hackney in 1993 by Julie Brown and a group of friends.. What started as 30 households buying fresh produce from an organic farm in Buckinghamshire grew over the following decades into a thriving organisation complete with multiple veg box schemes, urban growing sites, grower training and the first all-organic farmers’ market.

Through the early 2000s, community-led, values-driven food enterprises multiplied across the UK – market stalls, shops, box schemes – but it became clear that these small, independent businesses were often struggling in isolation. They needed a network behind them.

“We wanted to create a community for retail enterprises committed to an alternative ethically-driven food system. We wanted to support that network and at the same time provide guarantees to customers looking to shop in a different way”

– Julie Brown, Growing Communities Founder and BFT strategic advisor

From Movement to National Voice

In 2020, Better Food Traders was launched, supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and in partnership with Sustain. It aimed to harness and focus the collective power of all of those ethical enterprises committed to climate-friendly growing and eating.

Today, Better Food Traders is an ever-growing UK-wide network that supports and promotes sustainable, independent food traders and acts as the voice for the sector in policy-making and national conversations about food systems change.

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True food choice means having genuinely different kinds of places to shop. We believe a better system is possible.