Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket – Eric Hoffer
The resilience of capitalism is due, in part, to the ease with which poverty can be monetised. So, if your business has recently failed, and you feel let down by an economic system which no longer provides you with a decent standard of living, rather than spend the remainder of the recession wallowing in self-pity, now is the time to start a foodbank. It might even be possible to produce a business plan so compelling your bank manager forgets that unpaid Covid loan.
Thanks to the cost-of-living crisis the foodbank market, while established and dominated by a handful of major players, is growing rapidly. Inputs are close to zero, marketing costs are negligible – as are labour costs – and there is a steady stream of donations to leverage that personal loan. Just remember your new business will be classified as a charity so, if completing the business plan using a template, change all references to ‘profit’ to read ‘surplus.’
Feeding The Poor
There have always been those on the margins of society who are poorly fed. The members of the tribe who slept outside the cave, the citizens who lived outside the city walls: the old, the sick and the disabled. As social structures grew more rigid, inflexible and hierarchical there emerged an identifiable underclass unable to obtain food by means of exchange. Until the industrial revolution even those who laboured in exchange for food survived on a very poor diet. However, if a factory owner trained a person to carry out a complex task they wanted a decent return on their investment and production to continue without interruption. Neither were possible if a skilled machinist died prematurely or continually fainted from hunger. Krupp, the German steelmaker, set up inhouse medical centres, bakeries and canteens to ensure his employees remained fit and healthy. The blurred line between this concern for an employee’s welfare and enlightened self-interest became clearer during the second world war when Krupp gained access to an unlimited supply of skilled workers from concentration camps and labour became a consumable which required neither feeding or medical care at the steelmaker’s expense.
Seldom an industrialist’s largess extended beyond the factory gate and, by and large, the underclass was left to feed itself. There were occasional charitable endeavours, usually instigated by the wives of factory owners and aimed more at educating than feeding the poor. The cynical might suspect capitalist funded ‘philanthropy’ was an early form of virtue signalling which also dissuaded the underclass from revolting and created a repository of low-cost labour to be drawn on as required. It was the first chancellor of Germany, Otto Bismark, realising that an army marched on its stomach and the stomachs of a large section of the country’s male population were empty, who put in place welfare programs to improve the health of Prussia’s poor. It also made sense that if soldiers were going to walk mindlessly into a hail of bullets best these were drawn from the underclass rather than Krupp’s skilled workforce. Military leaders in Britain also complained how unhealthy and unfit were the young men who presented themselves at recruiting centres during the Second World War so, when hostilities ended, the government created a national health service to provide healthcare for the poor rather than continue relying on a patchwork of philanthropic endeavours.
Needs and Desires
Food is a physiological need which, according to American psychologist Abraham Maslow, along with access to water and air, requires satisfying before a person becomes concerned about their health or requires shelter. Ironic that in Britain while healthcare is free people are required to satisfy their need for food through some form of exchange. Or perhaps not, as capitalists have form when it comes to monetising physiological needs: the sale of bottled water and dividends paid to the shareholders of privatised utilities spring to mind. The increasing fetishization of food by celebrity chefs, its preparation and consumption as a form of entertainment in television programs such as the Great British Bake Off, the belief that ‘we are what we eat’ and food is merely a lifestyle choice, have all conspired to push food two tiers up Maslow’s pyramid of needs.
An iconic image of the Covid era appeared on Twitter around the time social media achieved peak clapping, it was of a woman photographed by her partner as she crossed a bridge on her way home from work in driving snow. Had this woman been one of the thousands of supermarket workers, exposed to queues of potentially infected shoppers without the protection of a mask, ensuring Britain was fed during the pandemic, the image would have barely earned a like let alone tens of thousands of retweets. However, this young lady worked for the NHS, so the image went viral. Hardly surprising as the social media agenda is set by the middle-class and working-class for whom food usually appears on the table in front of them as if by magic leaving plenty of time to worry about their health.
Heat or Eat
This three-word slogan sounds like something dreamt up by Dominic Cummings and makes about much sense as ‘build back better’ especially to those of us who remember the 1950s and ‘shivering before starving.’
Unlike fuel poverty, defined as spending more than 10% of your income keeping the lights on, cooking and staying warm, there is no precise measure of food poverty: although the political left constantly uses the number of foodbanks as a metric. You can assume, however, if you know the price of a supermarket’s own brand loaf of bread, the cost of each slice and how many days it will make up the principal part of your main meal, you are food poor. Although for most people in Britain starvation has slipped from living memory malnutrition unfortunately has not – there is a difference. Malnutrition we associate with sub-Saharan Africa and children with distended stomachs picking grains of rice out of a bowl, not obese shoppers with shopping baskets full of breakfast cereals and biscuits. But both these people, one starving the other overeating, are suffering from malnutrition: the clue is in the first three letters ‘mal’ – in Latin, ‘bad.’
Malnutrition in the Britain
The nutritional value of the food consumed by the underclass has declined steadily over the last half century in lockstep with an increase in the number of people who are obese. The sudden increase in the nation’s waistlines gives some indication of when the quality of food fell to the point where those experiencing food poverty also became malnourished despite, to outward appearances, having too much to eat. This was an outcome predicted when food manufacturers began disguising their products lack of nutrition by adding excessive amounts of sugar. Sugar is both cheap and highly addictive – think crack cocaine with a street value of £2.20 a kilo – providing both the energy and the temporary high people under financial pressure come to rely on to make it through the day. The downside of this excessive consumption of sugar is the impact on the consumer’s health. Hence members of the underclass being disproportionately afflicted by heart disease, diabetes and other conditions linked to being both malnourished and overweight.
Beyond predominately wheat-based products, cooked in palm oil and laced with sugar, other foods affordable by the underclass are of equally dubious nutritional value. Main meals are often scraps of meat cooked in batter and flavoured with salt. Desserts tend to be what the middle-class and working-class regard as confectionary. These low-cost food products would look unappetising were it not for additives to provide structure and add colour: additives which are linked to behavioural problems in children. The food industry has created a virtuous circle whereby a person’s diet impacts on both their health and education which in turn reduces their ability to engage in activities which would enable them to obtain food via exchange. You are about to turn this problem into a business opportunity.
Your Foodbank Startup
Labour
Let us start with what, for your previous company, was its principal outgoing – labour. You can now forget about the government’s minimum wage as most of your staff will be volunteers. You may even be able to fast track your enterprise by co-opting an existing community-based food sharing scheme: this will significantly reduce recruitment costs and time spent training staff.
Inputs
These, in theory, should be free, simply arrange with your local supermarket to have a box placed at the store exit and then empty it two or three times a day. The store manager will probably advise you on the optimum size of the box, but if not ensure it is slightly larger than a shopping trolley. This gives the shopper the impression your foodbank is receiving at least as much as they are taking home. While this overlooks the fact you are feeding over a hundred people, not just a family of four, and trying to do this with just one box of food, not the thousands of trolley loads wheeled out of the store every day. It does however usage the guilt felt by people who have never needed to divide the number of slices in a loaf of bread by 4 and then 7.
The contents of the box can prove problematic, remember that joke ‘Question: Why did the vegan cross the road? – Answer, To tell someone they were a vegan.’ The supermarket donation box helps liberals (and they are usually liberals: minded rather than politically orientated) who regard food as a lifestyle choice, to communicate with those whose relationship with food is purely physiological. The donation box allows them to do this without encountering, face to face, members of the underclass: which is your job. There is often a great deal of thought put into what goes into the box, admittedly most of it misguided. A person would find the idea of burning a £20 note in from of a homeless person is not going to wave a Sainsbury Taste The Difference readymade meal in front of one of your customers, nor that matter treat Tiny Tim to a Waitrose Heston Blumenthal Christmas pudding, even as a seasonal treat. But, at the same time their donations will attempt to educate the underclass and will reflect their own idea of what constitutes healthy eating. As most donors are unwilling to act as drug pushers for the food industry absent from the donation box will be what your customers most need, the sugar rich food which provides that temporary high needed to cope with the misery of food poverty.
When it comes to ESG (you need to look this up) giving away excess, out of date, food rather than burying it in a landfill ticks two boxes in a supermarket’s annual report the ones next to ‘Social’ and ‘Environmental’. Shame then if you find yourself in the same position as charity shops overwhelmed with half read copies of Prince Harry’s ‘Spare’. Not a good look if you are throwing, lactose free, vegan, sugar free, low fat, low salt food into a skip because customers cannot get their family to eat it regardless of how hungry they are.
The aim is to grow your business to the point where you obtain surplus food from a distributor, in this case one the organisations which collects unwanted food from a range of supermarkets: a sort of Bookers for the underclass. While reducing your margins this does provide a more selection of food which in turn should increase footfall.
Promotion
Handled properly marketing, like labour, will cost little and in some cases will involve no more than an email of a telephone call to the local TV news editor. You will need to partner with one of your customers, it is after all their story the journalist and TV viewers will be interested in. It is best this customer is actually a low paid member of the working class, they are usually more coherent and eloquent than members of the underclass and their poverty is more palatable to a the middle class audience. (An arrow on BBC iPlayer moves the news on 20 seconds and if your story is too depressing the viewer keeps pressing this to the end of your story and probably all the way to sport and the weather forecast).
Download a calendar of proposed strikes so, a few days in advance of the industrial action, you can pitch a story of a worker from the relevant sector resorting to using your foodbank. NHS workers are the gold standard but even the opportunity to film a striking fireman picking through a basket of out of date fruit juice should see a camera crew fetch up at your door.
Signage is important, do not rely on your foodbank’s name flashing up on the screen while you are being interviewed. Have a logo designed and choose a name that is memorable then put both on a large sign attached to the wall close to where your customers are filmed shopping or being served meals. Have a smaller version put on sweatshirts worn by yourself and volunteers – Green and Purple are a popular colours. As the business grows you might also want to think about custom printed carrier bags. The logo and name should be on the leased van used to deliver food parcels (choose magnetic signage – the reason will become clear later.) Fix the sign to the passenger door of the van not the side. TV crews like to film you, or one of your volunteers, unloading food from the van and handing it to a housebound customer (visibly housebound by the way, perhaps stood at their front door supporting themselves with a walking frame). If you fix the sign to the side of your van it will be obscured by the vehicles open sliding door.
Remember that unlike a TV advertisement you will have limited control of the narrative of any TV news report. The journalist will be middle class for whom poverty is an abstract concept. These are the sort of people who fly business class on British airways to film people dying of hunger and disease. It will be up to you to spot any potential problems: a recent example was an elderly lady who made an impassioned appeal for help with her heating while being interviewed in a warm hub but was then filmed relaxing in her well-appointed living room wearing a short-sleeved blouse on the coldest day in December. Inconsistencies such as these give potential donors the perfect excuse to walk straight past next time you are shaking a bucket in the high street.
Do not for forget to mention the grant you receive from the local authority. ‘We have been given £5000 by XYZ’ will not suffice. Better is ‘XYZ Council is helping us support members of the community with a grant of £5000.’ This alludes to the support being ongoing and hints at a longer-term relationship which should, if the local authority needs a bigger number to show it is doing something to help members of the underclass, result in more money coming your way. It will also reassure your bank manager there is an income stream to cover interest payments on that loan.
With respect to that loan, when a journalist asks you to comment on rising interest rates they are looking for anecdotal evidence that working class and middleclass house owners unable to keep up with mortgage payments and feed their children are now lining up with the underclass to beg for food. What you do not say on camera is that if interest rates rise further you might end up using a foodbank yourself. This might be true for your volunteers, but it is unlikely your business will fold if an increasing number of people are forced to use it. As well, statements like that draws attention to the fact that what you are passing off as a charity is actually a commercial venture.
Competition
The Trussell Trust had an annual income of £60 million and generated a surplus of £40 million in 2021 and, having since spent £28.3 million of that surplus on expansion, is now a major player in the UK foodbank market with around 1200 outlets. However, the market is growing rapidly and at a rate even large organisations struggle to keep pace with. Most of your competition will come from opportunists who, like yourself have identified poverty as a growth industry, the most aggressive these are faith-based food banks for whom ‘the poor will always be with you’ has become a mission statement.
When a Church of England vicar took up a post in a predominantly Methodist community (a hot spot of what the CofE still regards as ‘dissent’) they immediately co-opted charitable endeavours – such as Christmas boxes for Romanian orphans – from the local Methodist Church. When it was pointed out this form of aggressive competition was divisive, the vicar responded that her job was to get ‘bums on seats.’ Needless to say, her church has been quick to set up a foodbank. Your rivals will seldom openly market themselves as faith based, even so there will always be a hint of a dog collar beneath the sweatshirt when their CEO appears on TV, and the food bank’s name will contain words such as ‘light’ and ‘hope’ – the language used when talking to people who, thanks to God’s mysterious ways, have been left marginalised and malnourished.
As well as helping to raise their profile and appear relevant in an increasingly secular Britain, faith groups benefit financially from foodbanks. In annual reports submitted to the charity commission you will find ‘pastoral care’ listed as an expense. So, while having out of date vegetable curries shoved down their throats a captive audience of malnourished poor are fed a diet of fairy stories. All this is funded by donations which, in the absence of a cost-of-living crisis, would have had to come from the church’s own resources. This brings us back to your enterprise and the key question, ‘What is the bottom line.’
Earnings Projection
What you will get out of this enterprise is a CEO’s annual salary, which may not sound a particularly good deal for someone providing seed capital and who is, in effect, the owner of the business. The CEO of The Trussell Trust earns approximately £80,000 a year: this may seem a lot given the average wage in the UK is £33,280, but it is half the going rate for the head of a charity. As well, people heading up charities tend to be drawn from the professional class: people who regard a salary of less than £100,000 a year as practically offering their services for free. Your food bank, in the first year at least, will probably only pay slightly less than the average wage, which is still more than you took home from your nail bar before it went bust. On the other hand there will be chargeable expenses which, given the current rate of inflation, are worth having. And you can use the foodbank’s van for shopping, trips to coast or moving furniture: now you see logic in using magnetic signage.
Threats
The rather odd part of a business plan. Odd because, as pointed out at the beginning, the business case for your food bank is compelling. Twelve months ago if you were starting a fintech company here is where you would mention the remote possibility of an asteroid hitting a data centre on the outskirts of Brussels. Today high-tech companies face more terrestrial threats. Nevertheless, you can probably get away with a brief reference to something equally as improbably as a heavenly body obliterating all your Bitcoins, and here it is:-
The government belatedly wakes up to the serious deficiencies in the UK food industry and how badly the underclass is fed. It also realises the NHS cannot continue providing healthcare free at the point of need if forced to treat an increasing number of patients with malnutrition related conditions. A National Food Service (NFS) is set up with food free at the point of need for children below school leaving age. Supply or marketing certain food products is restricted to stem a growing addiction to sugar. Building on this the NFS promotes communal eating which reduces food waste, the energy expended on cooking at home and the environmental impact of individually packaged of food products. The government then removes the charitable status from foodbank operators and takes the major players, such as the Trussell Trust, into public ownership. All this would have a devastating impact on your business.
You can rest assured the above will never happen: the only person seriously suggesting anything along these lines is a celebrity chef who spent his career fetishizing food. Radical changes in how food is distributed would be limited by philosophical, economic and political constraints and prove almost impossible to implement even as inequality in Britain increases.
Philosophical Constraints
We tend to think of inequality only increasing during a crisis and then easing again in its wake. However, poverty has also increased during periods political and economic stability. One explanation for this apparent paradox is contained in philosopher Manuel DeLanda’s ‘Theories of Self-Organization and Human History’ which describes how new social structures form organically when existing ones are destroyed. Decades of free market economics and bouts of ‘creative’ destruction during the recent technology revolution have eroded the social structures responsible for increasing equality and providing near universal access to nutritious food during the middle of the last century. Since the 1960s the underclass’s decent into poverty has been gradual and gone largely unnoticed. The social structures supporting the poor now resemble those in place prior to the industrial revolution. The food chain itself has ‘self-organised’ along Darwinian lines with society’s strongest getting the best seat at the banquet while the weakest are left with any scraps thrown over the city wall. In response to this we have the food bank – but it is a response, or an answer, not a solution.
Economic Constraints
As Britain becomes poorer as a nation the charity-based foodbank business model will come under increasing pressure. There will be less ‘scraps’ for your business to distribute to a growing underclass and donations, both in the form of both food and cash, will dry up (The Trussell Trust has seen donations fall from £55 million to £32.6 million). The surplus generated by your foodbank will then depend on the food industry’s respond to growing poverty. Most likely the quality of low-cost food produced for consumption by the underclass and low paid workers will fall. Here companies can take full advantage of a relaxing of food standards following Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Political Constraints
The government might be forced by consumer groups to introduce a sugar tax on a wide range of food, particularly on products marketed to children. This is the legislation of choice for the middle class who consume relatively little sugar as it would perform the same role as the tax on cigarettes, effectively forcing those whose addiction are killing them to contribute to their end-of-life treatment rather than becoming a burden on the state and forcing other forms of taxation to increase. But, realistically, no one is going to stand up in parliament and say ‘This. Is. A. Disgrace’ then submit a bill attempting to nationalise food banks.
In 1968 the Labour government withdrew free school milk for children over 12 and then, in 1971, the Conservative government did away with free school milk altogether. There are members of the current government who believe any state-run initiative to improve the diet of Britain’s malnourished would put the country on the slippery path to becoming a Marxist state. The Conservative Party regard the underclass as a troublesome repository of cheap labour. The Labour Party is, as the name suggests, a party representing Britain’s working class. While its members often refer to the growth in the number of foodbanks, and the number of people using them, when campaigning for re-election the party leadership is more restrained realising, should they win the next election, which seems likely, they too will be forced to rely on foodbanks to feed Britain’s underclass.
Trade Unions, again, as the name suggests, represent the interests of working people. They focus on improving the pay and working conditions of their members: the plight of the underclass falls outside their remit. Despite being at their most powerful during the late 1960s trade unions offered little resistance to the Labour Party’s scrapping of school milk for their member’s teenage children. The Trade Union Council (TUC) campaigns hard to protect the NHS, which is the largest unionised employer in Britain, but the idea of creating a complimentary National Food Service has never been raised at its annual conference. From the TUC’s point of view an NFS could cause more trouble than it is worth seeing Unison, Unite and The Bakers Food and Allied Workers Union fighting each other over who should represent the new organisation’s employees.
Trade Union leaders realise educating and improving the health of the underclass and bringing more people into Britain’s workforce would boost union membership, increasing both their union’s political influence and its revenue: existing members, however, are less keen on the idea. Expanding the workforce during a period of low economic growth would depresses wages and, as generous as they are towards the malnourished when stood at the supermarket donation box, Britain’s working class is as wary of migration from the underclass as it is migration from Eastern Europe.
Even the far left, vocal critics of the inherent injustices within Britain’s class system, realise affecting change relies on mobilising the working class, not the underclass and, unfortunately that change is likely to leave the underclass as poor and marginalised as it is today.
ESG Compliance
No one is going to feed the underclass except you so, basically, name your price. When you ran that nail bar, which helped people feel good about themselves on social media and had a positive impact on their mental health, people regarded you as one of the petite bourgeois’ more tacky entrepreneurs. Ironic then that despite profiting from exploiting both the poor, and the volunteers attempting to help them, forcing the malnourished to go down on bended knee to beg for food which, in any equitable society, would be theirs by right (the food left on supermarket shelves after everyone else has filled their stomachs), helping reinforce the belief that satisfying the underclass’s basic physiological needs is a charitable act, feeding a sugar addiction which destroys the health of the most vulnerable and locks them into a viscous cycle of long term illness and poverty, that you are now signalling virtue out of almost every orifice, are regarded as a pillar of the community and could well be in line for an MBE.