Farmyard Frozen Give a stuff campaign
Fifty people to feast for free.
For the last three years, we’ve run a campaign called ‘Warm for Winter’, where we collect warm coats for people who need them. We lined the railings around Norwich Lanes with coats for the first year in 2019 to encourage people to leave one if they could or take one if they needed one. No questions asked. When COVID19 hit we carried on, but made collections and drop-offs instead – no railings needed. Some went to refugees, some to food banks, some St Martins Homeless charity and some just to local families in need of warmth.
This year, thanks to our daughter Cilla and her extraordinary ideas, we’re going a bit further because of the horrendous cost of living crisis – keep reading to find out why.
Feeding families at Farmyard this Christmas
On Sunday 4 December 2022 we’ll be opening the doors of Farmyard Restaurant to feed families in need. Our talented team will be treating some deserving families to some spectacular food and great company in the comfort of our restaurant.
To help us to host this free event, we’re being supported by some of our favourite local suppliers. CH Wine Merchants will be helping us by providing some complimentary beer & wine (Yay to that!), with additional support from our lovely suppliers at Dozen bakery, Barsby Produce, The Cheese Truckle, Intwood Farm, Swannington Farm to Fork and Fen Farm Dairy.
All the team working that day will work for love, not pay.
Norwich council and Norwich Food Banks are helping us find some families to invite.
This Christmas when you give stuff, show you give a stuff
Help us make this day even more special! Every purchase of a FARMYARD FROZEN Christmas box will help support this event. Containing all you need for Christmas Day, our boxes are packed with Farmyard’s finest dishes for two, for just £65, and with every box purchased, we’ll dontate some proceeds towards the cause. You can order yours online here.
Our restaurant-quality, frozen meal boxes make the ideal gift too, so we’re inviting local businesses to buy some as corporate gifts, so that we can keep adding to the pot and supporting our local community.
Why it matters to us
It’s a really challenging trading climate, no doubt. Bills are awful for us all, and we know many of our customers have less disposable income or are protecting themselves from whatever financial insecurity may lay ahead. Because of this, being able to match the menu prices to the true cost of purchasing from our equally budget-stretched farmers and producers while keeping customers coming in is a really wobbly tightrope to navigate.
What’s worse is the knowledge that many people locally, particularly their children, are in for a rough Christmas. At what’s meant to be a time for giving, there lay some difficult decisions to be made.
All of this is on the radio all the time, plus the horrors of the war. We do our best to shield our own children from the worst of it as best we can. Still, we do think it’s also important that they recognise what’s going on, so that their own generation might learn from our mistakes but also, that if they are lucky enough to get a few things they want this Christmas, plus a festive dinner AND a warm home, just how bloody lucky that makes them.
Fortunately, they’ve taken the news as well as you could hope. They’re concerned, questioning how on earth this might have happened and then asking what we can do to help.
Our daughter Cilla (9) is Dyslexic, which means she’s armed with the benefit of ‘Dyslexic Thinking’ – a recent addition to the Oxford Dictionary, defined as ‘an approach to problem-solving, assessing information, and learning, that involves pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, lateral thinking, and interpersonal communication.’ In layperson’s terms – a really decent version of thinking outside the box.
She started contemplating how we might go about helping families get food. She wanted to hand out sandwiches in Norwich, but we explained that environmental health might not like that. What about using Farmyard then? Good point really. We do indeed have an empty restaurant on a Sunday, so why not try and put on a nice lunch to treat a few families?
Children see things in a really simple way, which is helpful because doing something important or meaningful doesn’t have to be complicated.
As parents, we think if we can show Cilla that her idea is valuable and that it’s all worth the effort, she might grow up to keep on ‘passing it on’ in other ways. Maybe if she or one of her pals takes on a role one day which affects other people’s lives in any way, then she and her comrades might lead by morals and not ego – surely this has to be the future for the planet.
We won’t be able to go as big as Bob Geldolf here; we’re a small site aiming to feed fifty people for free, but we all have to start somewhere and vitally… we think it’s what Santa would want.
Farmyard’s Andrew Jones and Hannah Springham
Michelin levelRestaurant dishes
Michelin levelRestaurant dishes
