SEK Community Food Shop opens third Kent store in Chatham

Chain’s two earlier stores saved 170 tonnes of food from waste

SEK Community Food Shop opened a new community supermarket on the first floor of The Pentagon Centre in Chatham this week, the BBC reported, expanding a Kent chain that already runs similar stores in Ramsgate and Ashford.

Shoppers can walk in without an appointment and buy a range of budget-friendly groceries, the BBC reported, including a £1 fruit-and-vegetable bag. Prices are kept low by redistributing surplus food that would otherwise be wasted, helping to protect the environment at the same time, the BBC reported.

Gina English of SEK Community Food Shop told the BBC the shop would also function as a hub for non-food support. “In addition to supporting people with food insecurity, people will also be able get wraparound support from us, help with employment, looking at CVs and interview skills,” English said. “We’re also going to help people with budgeting and money management and signposting to other local services.”

Initial funding to set up the Chatham shop was provided by Medway Council through its Crisis and Resilience Fund, the BBC reported.

The Chatham outlet is SEK’s third in Kent. “We’ve had Ramsgate for about three years, Ashford just for just over a year and across the two shops in the last year alone we saw 55,500 transactions and we were able to save 170 tonnes of perfectly good food from going to waste, so they do work,” English said.

Medway Council leader Vince Maple told the BBC: “I think most people across Kent and Medway would want to see food not going to waste, so the ability to have good quality food at a reasonable price, helping not just our families and individuals on low incomes but helping all families has got to be a good thing.”

Among the first customers into the Chatham store were Shirley Graves and her partner Rod Taffs. “People want to come down and see what they’ve got, it’s amazing,” Graves told the BBC. “I’ve got a box of 20 samosas for £1.50 and a big huge bag of chicken for £6. Times are quite tight at the moment, being pensioners, it’s cheap and the chicken is amazing.” Taffs added that the chicken “is going to do us three or four meals.”

The Chatham shop includes a confidential, soundproofed office pod at the back of the store where customers can seek personal advice. The shop is open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 to 18:00.