Cardiff Community Meals.
Neighbours fund a meal. A local kitchen cooks it. Someone who needs it eats it, and every step is tracked. A cwtch, delivered with dinner.
Where it stands today.
The platform is built and you can use it right now. Requests, donations, business applications, delivery tracking and the public impact record all work end to end.
It is a prototype, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. Payments and donations are simulated, and the businesses listed are demonstration profiles rather than signed-up kitchens. Everything else is real working software waiting for real people to put behind it.
- Anyone can request a meal for themselves, or refer a neighbour, relative or patient
- Every request is checked before it appears, and nobody is listed without consent
- Donors browse open requests, choose how many meals to fund, and pick the kitchen
- Businesses apply with their FSA hygiene rating and delivery capability
- Bronze, Silver and Gold Community Kitchen badges recognise the ones who do most
- Every meal is tracked to confirmed delivery and counted in the public record
Why it works this way.
There are food banks, and they do essential work. This is deliberately a different shape, and each difference is there for a reason.
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The money stays in Cardiff
Every meal funded is paid to a Cardiff kitchen, not a national chain and not a distribution centre in another county. The same pound feeds someone and keeps a local job.
Which means the city gets two things back for every one it puts in.
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Dignity is designed in
Nobody is named without consenting to it, requests are verified before they go public, and a referral can come from a neighbour or a nurse rather than requiring someone to ask for themselves.
Which means people who would never join a queue can still be fed.
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It is a proper meal
Cooked food, delivered hot, from a kitchen with an FSA rating on record. Not a tin and a packet of pasta to take home to a flat with the electricity off.
Which means it reaches people a parcel cannot help.
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Every meal is accounted for
Donors see their meal tracked through to confirmed delivery. The public totals are the sum of real deliveries rather than a marketing figure nobody can check.
Which means a funder can audit it, which is what makes funding possible.
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Cymraeg yn gyntaf — Welsh first
The whole platform is bilingual and Welsh is the default, not a translation bolted on at the end. Every page, every form, every button, with a toggle for English.
Which means a Welsh public body can point at it without wincing, and a Welsh speaker is not treated as an afterthought.
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Welcoming, without conditions
Open to absolutely everyone — however you got here, whatever your situation, whoever you are. No means test, no proof of hardship, no questions about your circumstances.
Which means nobody has to prove they deserve dinner.
What it needs next.
The software is the easy part and it is already done. What turns a prototype into something that feeds people is three groups of humans saying yes.
Local kitchens willing to cook
Cafés, takeaways, restaurants, caterers and community kitchens anywhere in Cardiff. You would be paid for the meals you cook — this is not a request for donated food. You need a current FSA hygiene rating and a way to get a meal to a door, whether that is your own driver or a courier.
What I need from you: a conversation, and eventually your first booking. Start small — five meals a week is a real start.
Public bodies and funders
Cardiff Council, health boards, housing associations, social prescribers, GP surgeries and community trusts. Two things would change everything: a referral route so professionals can refer someone directly, and enough backing to cover the first few hundred meals while the donation side finds its feet. At the prototype’s £7 a meal, five hundred meals is £3,500 — small enough to sit inside an existing budget line, and large enough to prove whether any of this works.
What I need from you: someone to talk to, a view on safeguarding and data protection, and honesty about what would have to be true before you could refer to it.
People who want to start a cooking rota
This is the part that does not exist yet, and the part I most want to build. A rota is a handful of neighbours, a mosque, a church hall, a WI group or a street WhatsApp who agree to cook on a rotation — one household cooks Tuesday, another Thursday — for people nearby who need it. Paid kitchens cover what a rota cannot, and the rota covers what money should not have to.
What I need from you: to tell me you would use it, and what would have to be true for you to trust it. I will build the rota tools around real groups, not guesses.
The things I know are missing
Real payments, and a registered not-for-profit to hold them. A safeguarding policy reviewed by people who do this for a living rather than one written by a developer in good faith. Allergen and dietary handling a food business would actually sign off. A real domain instead of a placeholder, and a moderation queue staffed by humans rather than demonstrated by one. None of these are hard; all of them need the right person in the room.
What I need from you: if you do any of this for a living, half an hour of your time would be worth more than a month of mine.
Come and be part of it.
Whichever of those three you are, there is a way in below. No commitment attached to any of them — a conversation is genuinely useful on its own.
If you run a kitchen
Apply through the prototype itself. The demo approves you instantly so you can see exactly what your public profile would look like before committing to anything.
If you are a public body
Email me and I will come to you, walk you through the platform, and answer the safeguarding and data questions properly rather than hand-waving them.
If you want to start a rota
Tell me who you are and roughly how many households might join in. You will be shaping the rota tools before they are built, which is the best time to have an opinion.
One more thing, plainly.
I built this because it should exist, not because anyone commissioned it. It is not a company, there is nothing to invest in, and I am not asking anyone for money.
If it turns out somebody in Cardiff is already doing this properly, I would rather hand them the code than compete with them. Tell me and I will.