This neighbourhood initiative has won the award for best initiative in the Social Innovation category. The award is worth €5,000.
‘Aprofita’m’, an initiative of the Federation of Entities Calàbria 66 and winner of the €5,000 award for best Social Innovation initiative in the 3rd Mercabarna Paco Muñoz Awards, is a good example of how a neighbourhood and associative movement can seek formulas to solve the most pressing problems around them. In this case, ‘Aprofita’m’ seeks to meet the food needs of people at risk of social exclusion by focusing on food wastage and even making and distributing food.
Charitable menus in the Sant Antoni Market community kitchen
The project was launched in 2020 with the goal of building more sustainable and communitarian ways of living, consuming and interacting, and its formula is totally collaborative: users of the Eixample Esquera Community Rehabilitation Service (SRC) collect food from the partner shops in the neighbourhood (FoodCoop, Molsa-Ceres Naturals and IdoniCoop) and the donations received by the NGO De Veí a Veí and cook it in the Sant Antoni Market community kitchen to transform it into healthy meals.
These dishes are meant for people in socially vulnerable situations. Specifically, the recipients are 51 vulnerable families (74 women, 55 men and 45 children and adolescents) and 55 homeless people in the Sant Antoni neighbourhood and its sphere of influence.
In 2022, Calàbria 66 made 2,572 food portions, distributed 615 kg of products and contributed to emitting 938 kg less CO2 into the atmosphere.
3rd Mercabarna Paco Muñoz Awards
Created to promote and recognise initiatives that seek to counter food wastage, this year the 3rd Mercabarna Paco Muñoz Awards recognised not only Calàbria 66 in the Social Innovation category but also Ametller Origen in the category Best Initiative to Prevent Food Wastage. In this year’s edition, no award was given in the Technological Innovation against Food Wastage category.
The following factors were assessed when choosing the award-winning projects: positive social, environmental and economic impact; the number of actors involved in the different links in the food chain; quantification of the food wastage reduced; and the replicability, scalability and economic feasibility of the projects.
An expert jury
The jury for the awards was made up of experts from different institutions and organisations:
- Pilar Chiva, director of the Area of Circular Economy at the Catalan Waste Agency.
- Glòria Cugat, deputy general manager of Agrifood Inspection and Control at the Catalan Ministry of Climate Action, Food and Rural Agenda.
- Laura García-Herrero, Policy Officer, Joint Research Centre at ISPRA (Italian Institute of Environmental Protection and Research).
- Eduard Hernández, head of the Technology Area at the UPC-Mercabarna Chair for the Fight Against Food Wastage. Professor at the Barcelona School of Ecological and Biosystems Engineering (Polytechnic University of Catalonia, UPC).
- Fernando Ortega, president of the Agrifood Industries Committee of the Association of Agronomic Engineers of Catalonia.
- Nuria Pedraza, director of Communication and Institutional Relations at the AECOC (Association of Manufacturers and Distributors in the Food Sector).
The name of these awards is a posthumous tribute to Paco Muñoz for his long professional career in the fight against food wastage from both the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Aprofitem els Aliments platform (PAA).