The Okehampton Community Kitchen’s new food and hygiene bank initiative is set to open to the public sometime next week with six new volunteers.

Following on from an induction day for the new volunteers on Monday (February 6), Rebecca Green, the organiser of the Okehampton Community Kitchen, has announced that she is hoping to open the new food foundation to the general public this coming week.

She said: ‘So the foodbank’s already open but we’re just open by appointment at the moment. Next week, it will be open from Monday but I don’t know exactly what the hours are going to be.

‘We’ve had a successful induction day with six new volunteers that have all been trained in safeguarding, confidentiality and food hygiene. We have a lot of legal stuff that goes on in the background.’

The new Okehampton Community Kitchen food foundation will also be open as a warm hub following extra funding from West Devon Borough Council which has granted the community support group with over £3,000.

Since 3 East Street, Mrs Green’s cafe from which she runs the community kitchen, closed for refurbishment, the community kitchen has been working hard from behind the scenes to provide Okehampton’s virtual reality centre, Immersion, with food as part of its warm hub service.

The Okehampton Community has also recently been accepted into the Independent Food Aid Network (IFAN), a charity which supports independent food aid providers and campaign to end food poverty.

Mrs Green’s new service will offer more support to those in need and offer more sustainable food options along with cooking lessons and shopping advice and will also provide residents with cleaning supplies and offer recipe and shopping plans for those wishing to learn to cook or manage finances.

Mrs Green has described the Food Foundation as a ‘new food support service, not a food bank, open five days a week, and we will have a gourmet charity shop that funds it. Basically, we will be an immediate response point providing emergency food and we’ll also redistribute excess food and provide the cooked ready meals as well.’

The initiative grew following a public meeting in November last year in which members of the community gathered to discuss ways of tackling food insecurity in the area.

Mrs Green, who organised the meeting, described it as very successful as numerous suggestions were raised to provide help to those struggling, including community pantries, recipe packs and shopping plans which provides families with the skills to create a healthy weekly shopping with minimal expenses.

All this came as both the foodbank and the community kitchen reported a rise in the number of residents using their services as they struggle to afford necessities due to the ongoing cost of living crisis.