How a partnership between Impact Hub London and London Borough of Camden turned an ambitious mission into real-world solutions – with winners awarded £100,000 to continue their innovations.
In 2022, Camden Council set itself one of the most ambitious local government missions in the country: that by 2030, every resident in the borough would eat well every day with food that is nutritious, affordable and sustainable. It’s a bold commitment in a city where food bank use has surged and looks like it will continue to, where families may be facing the choice between heating and eating, and where the hospitality sector alone generates staggering quantities of avoidable food waste.
But it’s intentions like these which make environmental and social work so important, however the good intentions require more than political will. They require the right, innovative ideas from the right people – and within a supportive ecosystem to bring those ideas to life. This where our work with our Programmes & Partnerships comes in.
The Challenge
The scale of London’s food waste problem is stark. Every year, the capital’s hospitality and food service sector contributes to over 285,000 tonnes of wasted food – and there is a big motivation and margin to improve this wastage. In the London Borough of Camden alone, with more than 4,200 registered food businesses, the opportunity to do things differently is enormous.
Camden Council knew they needed a mechanism not just to fund innovation, but to attract it, nurture it and ensure that promising early-stage ideas could actually be developed into deployable solutions. And so The Camden Food Challenge Prize was born: the borough’s first-ever challenge prize, designed to reward the most effective and innovative solutions to a pressing food waste problem in the hospitality and food service sector.
They needed a delivery partner who could do more than just run an accelerator programme. They needed an organisation with deep roots in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, a genuine track record with diverse founders, and the expertise to take rough prototypes and help build them into credible, investable solutions.
How We Worked Together
Following a competitive application process, four finalists were selected by London Borough of Camden – each with a genuinely novel approach to reducing or managing food waste in Camden’s commercial food sector. Each received a £5,000 prototyping grant and, crucially, three months of structured support designed and delivered by Impact Hub London.
Our programme delivery for participants helped them to take their idea through to something scalable. We provided:
- Continuous mentor support throughout from November through to March
- Structured progress check-ins with our Senior Programmes Manager
- Pitching workshops and investor readiness coaching
- Access to Impact Hub London’s network of entrepreneurs
The programme was deliberately designed to meet founders where they were – not to impose a one-size-fits-all curriculum, but to provide a flexible, human-centred journey that matched the distinct needs of each entrepreneur.
Some needed help sharpening their business model, whilst others needed connections to test their technology. But all of them needed the kind of honest, experienced guidance that can only come from people who’ve helped hundreds of founders navigate exactly these challenges before.
The Results
The Demo Day – the culmination of the prototyping phase – saw all four finalists present their developed solutions to a panel of judges drawn from across the innovation and sustainability world.
Two winners were announced:
Also presenting were finalists CarbonTrac Camden – whose platform adapts proven supermarket intelligence technology to help hospitality businesses understand and reduce their carbon footprint – alongside a fourth team whose innovation contributed to one of the most competitive Challenge Prize cohorts Camden has seen.
Camden will now work with Soil Systems and Limetrack over the coming year as they scale and implement their solutions across the borough.
About Our Partnership
The Camden Food Challenge Prize is a demonstration of what becomes possible when local government ambition meets specialist delivery expertise. Camden brought the mission, the mandate, the participants and the funding. Impact Hub London brought the methodology, the network and the human infrastructure to turn that ambition into outcomes.
This kind of partnership – between institutions that understand a problem and organisations that know how to activate innovation around it – is increasingly how the most effective change gets made. It avoids the trap of well-intentioned programmes that lack the practical ecosystem support to help early-stage innovators actually succeed. And it creates a pipeline: not just of funded winners, but of a growing community of founders, mentors and ideas that Camden can continue to draw on.
Impact Hub London has supported nearly 1,000 entrepreneurs in building or scaling socially impactful businesses. We’ve been running a range of innovative programmes across construction, healthcare, food supply and waste and other social value initiatives. We sork with a diverse range of founders – including those from minority ethnic backgrounds, refugee communities and lower socioeconomic backgrounds – because we know that the most transformative innovations often come from people who’ve experienced the problems they’re solving.
About Impact Hub London:
Impact Hub London is a catalyst for positive change in the environmental and social world. We connect social entrepreneurs, investors, corporate companies and like-minded people alike. We do this through offering memberships to our hub in Euston for coworking, private offices and fixed desks, as well as day passes and day offices, and our event space. Additionally, we run programmes alongside value-driven partners to enable social entrepreneurs to bring their idea to life, through incubators, workshops and more.
