World Food Day happens every year, and this year’s event is on 16th October. Celebrating food and raising awareness about food security and hunger, World Food Day allows everyone to take stock and think how they can do a little different to provide food, information and education to those in need.

If you’re a restaurant owner or work with restaurants, it’s a day that offers great potential to help others and raise awareness of what your business does. Our latest blog explores ways that you can get involved in World Food Day and provide an experience for your customers that will help them and help advertise your food business to a wider audience. First, let’s take a look at some World Food Day stats.

 

World Food Day Facts

  • The first ever World Food Day took place in 1979.
  • It is celebrated in each year in more than 150 countries.
  • One third of the food produced in the world goes to waste.
  • Global food consumption reached 2.5 billion metric tonnes in 2021.
  • 9 out of 10 farms in the world are family farms.
  • The UK is provides 54% of the fresh vegetables for plates in England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

 

7 Things Your Restaurant Can Do for World Food Day

Work with Local Producers

Working with local food producers has two edges of positivity. Firstly, it gets fresh, delicious food quickly from source, but secondly, it helps those farms survive and thrive. Keeping cash in the local economy helps everyone, including the restaurant you run. Spending money with the farmers, who will in turn use their livelihood to spend locally themselves helps spread cash around your local area. Win, win, win, right?

 

Teach Locals to Cook

The best way to help people out, especially when money is tight, is to teach people how to use more of the things they buy. Fresh produce isn’t so expensive. Especially when you can buy individual items of fruit and veg, like you can in many major supermarkets. Putting on sessions for locals, teaching them exactly how they can utilise their food the best they can.

 

Educate Children on Food Prep and Health

This is similar to the point above, but focuses more on the long term. Children are taught the basics of food in school, but there’s so much more that could be shown to them. Finding out about how food can be best used, and what foods to eat more in moderation, and how they can cook some of their favourite meals could seriously improve both food waste but also health within the devolved countries in the UK. But starting local is the best way to give a little back.

An image with a dozen bags with herbs, rice and grains in.

Celebrate with a Theme

Running a restaurant is about making money, but there’s no need to sacrifice making a profit with doing good. Supper clubs and themed evenings are becoming more popular across the country, and using your supper club to educate on hunger across the world is a great way to add messaging into your current business plan. Get the reputation as the restaurant who cares.

 

Create Social Content

Easy, simple, and something everyone can do. Almost all restaurants in the UK use some form of social media, whether that’s hourly, daily or maybe even weekly. But creating content around World Food Day can help educate customers and point arrows in your direction as a company that cares. Mixing this in with one of the previous suggestions in this list could help inflate your reputation and attract custom from those that care about social causes too.

 

Feed Those Less Fortunate

Always a good option, but a great option if you’re finding yourself with extra food after service that only has a short life span left. Feeding those less fortunate can help them get the food they need without spending much/anything. Even hosting a special offer for low cost food could help people that are struggling to make ends meet.

 

Put on Special Offers

Just as I said above, why not put a special offer on to provide free food for children, or cheaper family meals, or something similar. There’s no reason you can’t get creative here, too. Could you ask customers whether they want to donate a portion of cash to those less fortunate, so that families can subsidise meals on certain days. There’s no hard and fast rules for this, and it’s a chance to come up with a new format that benefits the people that need it the most.

 

These are just a few ideas we’ve come up with off the top of our head. But in reality, there’s so much more you can do too. Why not get your staff’s heads together and come up with some inspirational ideas that could help celebrate this year’s World Food Day.


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