Full Fill

Discovery and Insights

Volunteering

Volunteering at community kitchens like FoodCycle, Nourish Hub, and Gurudwara langars allowed us to truly experience the warmth of communal eating, enabling us to actively participate in and connect with the people and activities within these spaces. Through this experience, we discovered how deeply community, mutual support, and shared meals foster a sense of belonging and dignity – which in turn showed us the potential to leverage community kitchens as a powerful, alternative model to mainstream eating, offering a more inclusive and supportive approach to food access.

Insights

We developed a new understanding through this process, and developed some key insights that informed the rest of our process.

• Community kitchens rely heavily on donations, making them an unstable source of food procurement. 
• They dictate what you eat, where you eat, and when you eat, offering no agency. People lack control over their food choices. 
• Community Kitchens create dependency, hindering skill development and self-sufficiency.
• The communal nature of these kitchens reduces the stigma attached to food aid to some extent.
• The best Communal eating models are never just about food, they are about the value they add to one’s life.

Opportunity

Fast food chains and grocery stores offer a wide range of cheap, ultra-processed options, while community kitchens, focused on healthier food, often lack variety. This creates a significant gap in both affordability and choice. We realized that mainstream models offer greater choice, leaving those from lower economic backgrounds with limited options—often between fast food and food aid. This growing disparity highlights an urgent need for intervention to bridge the gap in food access.

Food Well-Being

Through critical reflection, we realized that while community kitchens provide essential food support, they don't fully address overall food well-being. Our research led us to develop a comprehensive framework for achieving this goal. 

Community kitchens currently offer food access, foster community, and provide a more dignified experience than traditional food banks. However, to truly promote food well-being, distribution models must be more dignified, self-reliant, and empowering—enabling individuals to have the freedom to choose what, where, how, and when they eat, ensuring stability in times of need.

HMW

Agency and Access

How might we improve the experience of the current users of community kitchens by enhancing agency and access in the current structure?

De-stigmatisation

How might we destigmatise communal eating models for people who aren’t using community kitchens but would benefit from them?

Operations

How might we improve the operations of communal eating models to become self-sufficient and stable?

Our research led us to create 9 core pillars that would improve the food well-being within the current models of community kitchens, and also offer a segway to create a new model of affordable food access.

Solution

We originally set out to create a new model for affordable food access. However, after reassessing our core principles and consulting with experts, we recognized that improving the current system would yield faster and more meaningful results. While individual community kitchens have limited reach, we discovered that unifying them can significantly amplify their impact. Based on this insight, we created Full FIll.

Full Fill

Full Fill is a service-driven organization committed to making diverse, affordable food options accessible to all. It connects individuals with a network of low-cost or free communal dining spaces, empowering them to choose the best options that suit their needs within our extensive network.

For community kitchens, Full Fill offers comprehensive support to stabilize operations and enhance efficiency. We also provide opportunities for these kitchens to achieve self-sustainability by implementing effective monetization strategies.

Full Fill partners with external organizations, serving as the face of community kitchens within a larger alliance. Our network simplifies access to various food options, enabling people to easily navigate and select what works for them through Full Fill's website. Additionally, we support the stability of community kitchens by diversifying their funding sources and volunteer base. The Full Fill dashboard provides kitchen managers with quick access to our team for assistance and offers streamlined management of all Full Fill activities within their kitchens.

Prototypes

Website: The website helps to offer a dignified and autonomous experience around affordable food by providing choice, through the navigation feature for browsing the kitchens.It also stabilises the routine of accessing food everyday.

Dashboard: The dashboard provides community kitchens support in managing their operations related to funding and volunteering. It acts as a quick access point for community kitchens to ask for a shout of help.

Brand: To help destigmatize and reshape perceptions of food from community kitchens, we believe that effective visual merchandising is essential. Our offerings include surplus meal kits and Full Fill-branded shelves, providing people with appealing, alternative food options they can cook at home. This approach not only encourages greater participation in community kitchens but also plays a crucial role in reimagining these spaces as a credible source of food access.