Café Recharge
Café ReCharge is a surplus food café in Galashiels, in the Scottish Borders. The social enterprise aims to reduce the gap between food waste and food poverty by operating a Pay What You Can café.
Inspired by her love of cooking and the idea that low-cost food can be great food, Amy Wight founded her social enterprise, Café ReCharge, in 2019. The café provides hot and healthy meals with unsold produce from supermarkets and local food producers in order to combat food waste.
Café ReCharge aims to provide delicious meals to everyone in the local community, regardless of their income. They hope to encourage community engagement and integration, and reduce isolation and food poverty, by creating an inclusive and non-judgemental space for all members of the community.
The café was due to open a week before lockdown, so Amy and her team had to quickly adapt their services to keep their social enterprise going. Despite this challenge, in the first four months of lockdown, Café ReCharge supplied over 1000 meals and food parcels to people in Galashiels and diverted over 3555kg of surplus food from going to landfill.
We spoke to Amy in July 2020 about her journey starting a social enterprise and the challenges she has faced.
Since we last spoke to Amy, Café ReCharge located to new premises and from February has been operating on a take-away basis. Café ReCharge will be open for dining in soon, so follow them on Facebook or Instagram to keep up to date.