Collaborating and Stacking: alternative models for better food trading

This session is for free for Better Food Traders Members and is running as part of our annual Business Support Week. Become a member of Better Food Traders.

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Have the drive to build a food business that aligns with your values, but worry about making a living and staying true to those ways of working?

In this interactive 2-hour talk and workshop, Kimberley Bell, baker and founder, will explore how non conventional business models can help you find both joy and a good salary when producing and trading good food in and for a community.

About this session:

Kimberley will share experience from transitioning Small Food Bakery from a Ltd company with high ideals (and some  of the highs and lows that come from that!)  to a collective working space that will sustain into the future. She will also share stories from the early days of establishing Nottingham Mill Coop in Nottingham Mill Coop, building a very radical organisation from the ground up.  

The session will inspire you to consider how collaboration can build efficiency and help break through barriers to practicing agroecological values in your business.

In this session, you will explore:

• The issues of the mainstream grocery landscape
• The barriers to stepping outside of neoliberal models and how to work around them
• Identifying your own drivers,  what makes you unique and clarity around your needs
• Identifying or creating appropriate spaces to work
• How to clearly model a diversified and complex practise of producing and retailing
• Practical tools for sharing spaces and other infrastructure

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About your trainer

Kimberley Bell is a baker and shopkeeper at Small Food Bakery in Nottingham. Over 12 years she has built a bakery production that centres agroecological  ingredients, exploring small scale, relationship based trading as a lever for change in the food system. Kimberley also co-founded UK Grain Lab in 2017 and Nottingham Mill Coop in 2021. Nottingham Mill Co-op is a community flour mill and bakery kitchen space based in Nottingham city centre. They are not-for-profit co-operative, owned and controlled by their members, who are encouraged to help shape the direction and activities of the space by participating in sociocratic governance meetings.

About Better Food Traders

Better Food Traders (BFT) is a not-for-profit CIC that empowers and equips traders, communities, and growers to rebuild an independent, sustainable food sector. We support agroecological farming and help build routes to market that reduce the environmental impacts of food, enabling a just transition to a more climate- and nature-friendly food system.

As part of this, we support a national network of independent food traders, including veg box schemes, shops, wholesalers, bakeries, fishmongers, farmers markets and online retailers who are united by a commitment to trade UK-grown, ethically produced and organic/agroecological food