East Birmingham Food System Exploration
East Birmingham is full of energy, culture, and innovative thinkers, but has some of our worst health, economic, and wellbeing challenges compared to other parts of our city. This is why the East Birmingham Inclusive Growth Strategy was created with a 20-year plan to make East Birmingham a great place to grow up, live and work, and where people are healthy and successful.
We identified a key opportunity to achieve these ambitions for East Birmingham by:
- understanding the food system challenges
- developing and empowering the local residents to own the interventions taking place
- building a healthy food economy together that will encourage a thriving and healthy community, economy, and environment
We commissioned The Young Foundation to complete a community research project called the East Birmingham Food System Exploration. The focus was on recruiting, developing, and empowering East Birmingham residents to become community researchers exploring the food available in their area. They used a peer research approach to investigate the food system and offer policy recommendations and ideas for future research into creating healthy food systems.
The research aimed to improve understanding of the role East Birmingham food businesses play in providing healthy food to their communities, such as:
- the barriers to the provision of healthy, affordable food that businesses experience, including cost of food, food supply, how decisions are made in businesses, and perceptions and beliefs about food
- the food system workforce, including where people are recruited from and what skills, knowledge, and training they receive
- potential gaps in skills and knowledge among food system workers, and how these might be filled
- key actions that can be co-produced to support food businesses to provide healthy, affordable food
Learn more about the East Birmingham Food System Exploration research.
Download the final East Birmingham Food System Exploration report.
Page last updated: 28 April 2026
