In March 2026, Growing Good users processed over £1m of local veg box sales - generating an estimated £3.7m of real value for people, farms and communities across the UK.
A timely reminder
The events of recent weeks have made this conversation more urgent. Writing in the Guardian this week, Professor Tim Lang - one of the UK's leading food policy experts - argues that the US-Israel conflict in Iran has once again exposed how vulnerable Britain's food system is to global shocks. Oil prices spike, long supply chains seize up, and the government finds itself scrambling. It happened when Russia invaded Ukraine. It happened in 2008. It keeps happening because we keep building the same fragile system and hoping for the best.
The UK currently grows only 62% of what it consumes. The rest travels through supply chains that, as Lang puts it, are "more vulnerable to disruption by global events" with every passing year. The answer, he argues, is more short, diversified chains - more food grown and distributed closer to home.
That is exactly what the box schemes and growers in this community are already doing.
In March 2026, something quietly significant happened
For the first time, the schemes and growers in the Growing Good community collectively processed more than £1 million of local veg box sales in a single month. We wanted to mark it - not just as a platform milestone, but as a signal about what's happening in local food systems right now. And to do that properly, we need to talk about what food actually costs.
The price on the label is not the price of food
There's a common assumption that local, organic, and community-based food is expensive. That a veg box from a small grower is a luxury, while a supermarket shop is the sensible choice.
The Sustainable Food Trust published research that challenges this directly. Their analysis found that for every £1 spent on food in the UK, an additional 97p is paid in hidden costs. These aren't costs that appear on a receipt. They're absorbed through taxation, water bills, NHS spending, and the long-term degradation of soil, air, and ecosystems.
The report breaks it down: diet-related disease costs society £44.9 billion a year. Greenhouse gas emissions and environmental damage from agriculture cost another £37.4 billion. Biodiversity loss, food waste, antibiotic resistance, water contamination - all of it adds up to a hidden bill of over £116 billion annually, roughly matching what UK consumers spend on food at retail.
In other words, cheap food isn't cheap. It's just that most of the cost has been shifted - onto the NHS, onto future generations, onto the land itself.
What this means is that when you pay a fair price to a local grower, you're not paying a premium. You're paying the actual cost of growing food well. The grower isn't externalising the damage - to the soil, to wildlife, to public health - and passing it on invisibly. The price reflects reality.
The number behind the number
This context makes the Growing Communities research even more striking. Working with the New Economics Foundation and the Soil Association, they found that every £1 spent through a local food scheme generates £3.70 of value - for the people eating, the farmers growing, and the planet sustaining it. Compare that to the supermarket model: less than 15p in every £1 ever reaches the farmer, while the system quietly accumulates its hidden tab elsewhere.
Apply that £3.70 multiplier to March's £1m+ of local veg box sales across the Growing Good community, and you're looking at roughly £3.7m of genuine value flowing back into local food systems, farms, and communities - in a single month.
The community growing behind it
This year, we've welcomed many brilliant new box schemes into the Growing Good community. Each one is different, but all of them share a commitment to building a more local, resilient and sustainable food system - and to telling the true story of what their food is worth. Here’s some wonderful examples;
Locavore in Glasgow are one of Scotland's most ambitious local food enterprises - a worker co-operative running a veg box scheme and shops, all rooted in making good food more accessible across the city.
Shillingford Organics in Devon is one of the UK's longest-running organic box schemes - decades of commitment to growing and delivering food in a way that works for the land as well as the people on it.
Living Larder on the Isle of Wight is a family-run market garden delivering fresh, seasonal organic produce year-round. Run by husband-and-wife Will and Aimee - Will inspired by his family's long tradition of growing on this land, Aimee by her love of food and healthy living - a family business that clearly means what it says.
Oxton Organics have been farming organically since 1986, when founders Jayne and Julian started with 5 acres and a belief in growing quality food for their local community. Four decades on, what was a bare field is now a thriving regenerative farm - vegetable gardens, orchards, wildflower pastures, and hedgerows full of birdsong. A haven for wildlife and people alike.
Ash & Elm are a small market garden and CSA in mid-Wales, built over more than a decade on 5 acres of Welsh grassland. They grow food, run horticulture courses, and have built a community that shows up every Tuesday to volunteer. The kind of place that's doing more than growing veg.
Each of these box schemes pre-date Growing Good, we feel lucky to have them contribute to our community as we build capability and shared knowledge together.
What local food schemes really offer
One of the most powerful things a local food scheme can do is help its customers understand what they're actually buying into. When someone joins a veg box scheme, they're not just getting vegetables. They're opting out of a food system that quietly costs all of us more than we realise, and into one that's paying its way honestly.
The Sustainable Food Trust's research gives growers a framework for telling that story. The £3.70 multiplier from Growing Communities gives them a number. And every box delivered is evidence that the demand exists, that people are ready to vote with their spending for a different kind of food system.
The infrastructure to support more of that - better tools, better data, better connections - is what we're here to build.
What this adds up to
Local food isn't a niche. It's a serious, growing part of how people in the UK want to eat - and an increasingly important part of how rural and urban economies sustain themselves.
The £1m month matters because it represents real growers doing real work, getting paid fairly, and feeding real communities. March felt like a marker worth recognising.
As more people understand what food actually costs - and what local food actually creates - the case for this community gets stronger, not weaker.
Steve, Co-founder, Growing Good
---
Sources: Sustainable Food Trust - The Hidden Cost of UK Food (revised edition 2019). Growing Communities Impact Report 2021 research conducted with the New Economics Foundation and the Soil Association. Tim Lang, The Guardian, 9 April 2026. Thumbnail pic by Umair Ali Asad on Unsplash.