In 2019 we obtained funding from the National Lottery for a four-year programme of work, taking Peas Please all the way through to Autumn 2023. A UK-wide partnership inititive with Food Foundation, Food Sense Wales, Good Food NI and Nourish NI, we set out with three ambitious goals:

1. To see more veg eaten: We want more veg on offer in convenient and easy-to-eat ways. We want veg to be more appealing and desirable. And we want low income households to have greater purchasing power to buy veg.
2. To catalyse a permanent shift in the food system in favour of higher veg consumption, reflected in both business practice and Government policies.
3. To establish a successful model for enabling people’s voices and lived experience to help create food system change.

To meet our goals, Peas Please used a food systems approach that focused specifically on vegetables, aiming to bring together actors from across the UK food system with the common goal of making it easier for everyone to eat veg.

So, after 4 years, what did we achieve?

Scotland’s ‘National Veg Summit’ was held on 31st October 2023 at Edinburgh International Conference Centre and was one of four veg summits held across the UK nations. The summit was attended by 179 people, representing a diverse range of people and organisations from across the Scottish food system, from government to growers, caterers to communities, and marked the end of the current phase of the Peas Please project. Working across the food system to reduce barriers and increase access, Peas Please has been shown to increase UK veg consumption by over 1.1 billion portions since it started in 2017 – no mean feat and a definite cause for celebration!

The summit also held against the backdrop of a forthcoming consultation on Scottish Government’s ‘National Food Plan’, a commitment made in the Good Food Nation Act (2022). Whilst we know the Scot’s diet is one of the worst in Europe, the Good Food Nation Act provides a once in a generation opportunity to fundamentally change how we do food in Scotland. Therefore, as the first UK nation to have a food plan, the veg summit provided an opportunity to bring people together to ask the question:   ‘How can we make it easier to eat veg in a Good Food Nation?’.

There is a National Veg Summit Report that details the day, including outcomes and next steps, and also a podcast with interviews and comment from some of those who attended and presented at the event.

Email us about Peas Please and how we’re progressing our work to increase access and remove barriers to eating veg and pulses.