Social Entrepreneurs Spotlight blog 3 – Duncan Swainsbury – Bounceback Food

In this instalment of the Social Change Academy spotlight blog series, I interview social entrepreneur Duncan Swainsbury. Duncan is founder of Bounceback Food CIC, a fantastic social enterprise which has been fighting food poverty in the UK since 2014. Through adoption of the ‘buy-one, give-one’ model, Duncan has established a sustainable social enterprise which has not only successfully managed to survive the COVID crisis, but has taken this challenge as an opportunity to further grow their impact by making effective use of technology and scaling their business model which is now being replicated across cities in the UK. Bounceback Food provides a range of healthy cooking classes and has published some amazing recipe books. I encourage you to explore their great products and services at bouncebackfood.co.uk and follow them on Twitter via @BouncebackFood. But let’s start with the interview.

1 – What is it about you that made you want to start a social enterprise?

I had reached the end of University, where I had to face the question of what I wanted to do with my life and with my degree. I had studied economics and business management, but what appealed most was the practical side of starting a business from scratch. I had come across TOMS shoe brand – and their social enterprise model of one for one – where you buy one and give one away. It was around that time I started to volunteer at a food bank and I thought we could use that social enterprise model to address food poverty in the UK.

When I started to research food poverty statistics I was shocked by the scale of the problem and determined to do something about it, it’s still a real source of motivation. Initially I was naively optimistic that I could solve the problem in a few years’ time. Of course when you really start to get to grips with an issue like food poverty it is such a big challenge you realise you need to scale your impact to really make a dent in the problem. We started with a stall in Salford and now we are not just donating food to food banks but also teaching people how to cook using the same buy one give one model. We are thinking about how we can do what we have been doing for the past few years at scale in order to have a bigger impact. Currently the data is going in the wrong direction with food poverty increasing because of COVID so we need to do more, to think bigger, in order to address these challenges.

2 – What have been the main challenges you faced so far and how have you overcome them?

A huge challenge for any social enterprise is funding – getting finance in place to get yourself off the ground and testing your ideas. I was fortunate to be part of the School for Social Entrepreneurs Start-up programme in Salford back in 2014 and got a grant of £4000 to get going. It wasn’t a huge amount but it enabled us to test our model, buy the equipment we needed and get going. The challenge was to develop a business model which doesn’t rely on grants and funding and to make it sustainable. Access to finance and creating a sustainable model longer term is a real challenge. It requires you to create really good products and services. We addressed this challenge by developing our own trading revenue streams, which we did for instance by putting together a hardback recipe book, developing the equivalent e-book and audiobook, bringing out a sequel, developing a podcast and having sponsors etc. So developing your own revenue streams is really fundamental.

There are other challenges as well. As a social entrepreneur you are constantly faced with challenges in various forms, so in the past few months with COVID we have had to completely adapt how our face-to-face model works so we have had to overcome challenges like that. Through social media and support from organisations like the School for Social Entrepreneurs we have been able to continue to address issues like food poverty despite COVID. We’ve addressed this challenge by being able to use technology. We still have same buy-one-give-one model using online and we can now provide free places to people nationally rather than just in the locally, so technology is a big part of our response and approach to scale up our model.

3 – What are the most important insights you have gained along the way and what tips do you have for other social entrepreneurs?

One of the key things I’ve learned is the importance of creating trading revenue streams. The other insight is the importance of patience. As social entrepreneurs we like to tackle huge societal challenges and these things take time before we start to see the impact of our ventures. If you’re going to take on a huge challenge as a social entrepreneur, having patience and a willingness to test ideas as an organisation and becoming sustainable are really important.

Initially a lot of social enterprises are quite grant dependent, but when that grant funding dries up, what is going to keep you going as an organisation? Also developing a team of people in the long run is critical because you can’t do this on your own.

4 – Which skills and attributes do you feel have been the most important in building your social enterprise?

Firstly the ability to innovate and look at a challenge in a different way, to test ideas and explore how a problem can be solved. Then there’s an appreciation and willingness to fail – you’ve got to try different things and approaches. Determination is key as well.

One thing that keeps our team in Manchester motivated is that we’re very focused on the social impact data that we are generating, the number of items of food that we sell, the number of people that we are helping etc.

Working with other people in partnership is also very important – we have a growing network of partner charities with whom we provide access to our Cooking & Nutrition Portal. As another example, with the second fundraising recipe book we worked with 20 artists across Manchester, Cheshire & North Wales to create artwork for the book. Working with others is fundamental to building your social enterprise from being a single person to growing your impact with a team of people.

5 – What has been your most heart-warming, inspirational or transformational experience since you started your social enterprise?

A guy called Michael was referred to us from Middlewich foodbank on a free place on one of our buy-one -give one cookery courses. He was in his eighties and he had very limited cooking ability – he basically could only peel a potato. His wife had passed away and it had been her who had done all the cooking. Because of our cooking classes he was able to join our community cooking school and over time we taught him several healthy recipes to cook. The way he was making contact and sharing stories with the group and then seeing that sense of achievement was just fantastic. It is absolutely wonderful when you can see the impact of what your organisation has done for people and you just want to do that in greater numbers.

6 – What will your social enterprise look like in five years’ time and how will you get there?

So we literally today launched a crowdfunding campaign to help us replicate our model across different towns and cities in the UK by 2024 – so hopefully our social impact will be much greater!

7 – What is your favourite (local) dish?

It’s impossible to choose because we’re blessed with such a diversity of cuisine within Greater Manchester! Any recipe we teach on our public cookery courses or that features in our recipe books would definitely be a contender!