Buy Local South East

The Food and Drink sector has become increasingly important on the regional government agenda in recent years, with food tourism growing in the South East. British food (Buy British) has become hugely popular in and outside the UK, with customers growing more environmentally aware. There is a shift toward local and sustainable food.​

The COVID-19 pandemic brought the role of the food and drink sector in our regional rural economy into sharp focus. The forced shutdown of pubs, restaurants and cafes had a disastrous effect on the hospitality sector and its supply chain of growers, producers and distributors. This project aims to capitalise on a renewed focus on local buying to support all businesses in the food and drink sector to weather the storm and rebuild a sustainable business in the recovery period.

The project will produce:

• A regional website and portal to signpost customers to local food and drink businesses showing the SELEP region (buylocalfoodanddrink.co.uk), which is a centralised food and drink platform for the area aimed at consumers(B2C page) and businesses (B2B page) looking to buy local in the Southeast;
• A SELEP area wide Buy Local Food and Drink marketing campaign focussed on local producers, retailers and followed by hospitality and tourism experiences;
• Central database for food and drink businesses in the SELEP area;
• A series of business recovery support activities for food and drink businesses based on a sector COVID-19 impact and recovery survey. This could include surveys, training, 1-2-1 support, connecting suppliers with buyers, and knowledge exchange conference. The activities do not relate to financial support, which might overlap with Government/County Council initiatives, but rather focused activities dependant on the outcome of the sector survey.

The work is supported by the need from local producers to develop business relations with wholesale, retail and hospitality sectors to build their businesses.

Sector Support Fund

The Sector Support Fund (SSF) was established to support one-off, discrete pieces of work of a pan-LEP nature with a sector focus that bring demonstrable benefit and which have support across the LEP area.

The SSF used Growing Places Fund (GPF) Revenue grant to fund a programme of works which supported the sector focussed activities being undertaken on a pan-LEP basis and which were predominantly led by the SELEP working groups.