The fridge is primarily about food waste. It’s about reducing the amount of supermarket food that goes to landfill. We started in February 2023 and as of November 2025 we’ve redistributed over 97 tonnes of food. We have a team of about 30 volunteers who collect food from supermarkets, they bring it to the fridge and weigh it in and then we have a team again of about 30 volunteers who help to man the fridge and they supervise everyone coming in and sorting out all the food.

We started off with only two or three supermarkets that we collect from and now it must be about eight or ten supermarkets, so it has grown as the projects become more established. A lot of people are interested in food waste, so that’s a good starting point. But the sort of spin-off from the food waste side is there are people who are struggling a bit at the moment and we’re non-judgmental, we don’t say you have to pay to come, you can just give a donation.

We’ve set up Fridge Chat one Saturday morning a month in the library, people come to the fridge, collect their stuff and then go along to fridge chat. They share baked goods, they have tea and coffee and a good old chat. I think it’s quite good that a lot of older people, perhaps, that have felt a bit isolated come along and, you know, make new friends and chat, I think that’s really good. There is [a community feel]. Menston Pre-school come in and pick up some bread and fruit for the children’s snacks. The library comes in on a Thursday because they have an after school story time and they get some fruit for the children. Menston Primary School, we’re also fairly close to, a couple of times they’ve come to us and said, this family’s really struggling, can you help? They distribute food vouchers which we apply for a grant, we buy supermarket vouchers and give them to the school to pass on to families who are struggling, so that works really well. I feel very very proud [of the community fridge]. It’s amazing how it’s developed and grown.

You get people coming in and chatting about, you know, the fact they’ve been in hospital and what they’ve had done and they’re sharing things that perhaps they wouldn’t normally share with other people. I mean, this one lady came in every Saturday and she’d only just got back on her feet after having some operations on her legs and she said, I’m starting to walk now so I’m going to come along and have a chat to everyone and she might have picked up a packet of bread rolls or something. She didn’t really come for the food, she came for the chat. People who don’t know what the fridge is, if you are interested in cutting down on food waste then very much come along, use us, anybody is welcome, anybody at all. And if you’re struggling, don’t want to admit it maybe, you can come along and use the fridge, you know, there is no judgments, everyone’s welcome.

I think it does take people a while to get their head around [that] there is a difference between a community fridge and a food bank. I think that’s such an important message for people.

It’s all about community for me, I think. I mean, obviously there’s the cause but there’s just an immense pleasure in doing something that’s right where you live.

I do love seeing people come through, you know, people who you haven’t seen for ages and then I like seeing the side products, like people who are a bit lonely and they like sitting out in the corridor. They like being an hour early, so you should never stop them from being an hour early because it’s nice that they get a chance to chat to people, it might be the only conversation they have that day whereas if they go to a supermarket no one’s going to talk to them. So there’s loads of offshoots I think, things that are really satisfying when you get home and think, that was nice.

In terms of people that come, it’s every age group.
[I wish] that enough people knew that it’s for everybody. It’s not about poverty, but that’s a fabulous side benefit of it.

Whether you get involved with your belief system or your community, you’ll never regret doing something. There’s a really brilliant set of volunteers [here] and my slot only comes up I think once a month, so it’s really it’s nothing.

The local preschool here, it’s always short on funds. They get so little and they survive for the children but on very little so [the teacher] can come in here and they don’t have to pay, so they have snacks every day at preschool. It looks tiny but actually that makes a huge difference to them across the year.

[It’s about] being part of the system. It’s belonging to something that’s got a very valid purpose.

I come from farming family, so you know, food was always a precious item, both in producing it and not wasting it. I suppose that’s why I’m keen on supporting other people using things.

We’re here on a Monday morning so we expect to pick up quite a lot of people coming back from school drop offs so that’s one of the reasons for the timing here and then there’s Wednesday evening and a Saturday morning, so you try and catch different people.

A lot of it comes down to the supermarkets’ habits of buying, and I guess they only want to sell what people want, so it’s all a bit of a cycle. We encourage people to think more about what they’re going to eat and engage more with it.

I think it’s worth while doing. Getting in the part of the system and feel that you’re actually trying to make a minor difference.

There is a huge [community feel to the fridge] and it overlaps with other things.

Fridge Chat was set up by a couple of volunteers at the Community Fridge. I think as volunteers we found that when we were working at the Fridge, we kind of noticed that there were people that would come in who were keen to talk. I did wonder whether those individuals had actually spoken to anyone the week before. When I spoke to another volunteer about it, we said, wouldn’t it be nice if we could extend the Community Fridge on a Saturday morning so that instead of people just coming in taking some of the food and then leaving they could actually come next door to the library or to the community centre and actually maybe talk about the food that they’ve got, think about what they might be baking or cooking and maybe have a cup of tea.

I think the strangest thing that I’ve made has been brussel sprouts brownies, they went down really well, I think people said that they enjoyed them. It’s an opportunity to experiment.

First of all it started off with like three or four people, but now I think we have regulars that come every month, usually about 25 people, sometimes we have more, sometimes less. But it has continued and that kind of told us that perhaps there was a need to bring people together and to give them a chance to kind of chat. We don’t always talk about food, we just talk about anything now.

I think that’s been great because I think there’s some people that come now that have become friends as well and it means when you’re walking around the village, if you see someone from Fridge Chat, you can stop them in the street and have a chat. So the chat doesn’t stop at Fridge Chat, it continues afterwards.

I’m a missionary from the church and we are seeking the opportunity to serve others. We found this service and I feel like this is a great service for people.

I think it’s an amazing resource. It’s doing brilliantly to stop waste going to landfill and it’s just an amazing service for folks, there’s no limits on who can come, and it’s a lovely community service.

The people who volunteer here are amazing, they’re so lovely and friendly and helpful and it’s just a great community asset, really to bring folks together a few times a week.