Table Talk Foundation launches in Sussex

A new charity has been launched in Sussex to help provide food education to children in the county as well as providing support for members of the hospitality sector who have fallen upon hard times.

Table Talk Foundation was the brainchild of local business owner Daniel Wade but has been bought to life with the help of eight fellow trustees.

Dan, this is very different to your other business. What has made you launch a charity?

Yes, it is very different to my health insurance business! My background is in hospitality and it’s an industry I am extremely passionate about. My first job was in my local bakery icing all the cakes and putting the jam in the doughnuts. The bakery was owned by some close family friends and everything was made from scratch to a high level. This is where my love for cooking started.

After leaving school, I attended catering college and trained as chef. I worked as a chef for 3 years and was fortunate enough to do work experience with some great chefs including Gordon Ramsay and Jean Christophe-Novelli.

I am massively into my sport and started to miss playing rugby and working as a chef, you do not get any weekends off so I decided to stop cooking.

However, the skills I learnt during my time as a chef really helped when I launched my business 11 years ago. Teamwork, communication, and hard graft all have helped me. But more importantly, learning about where food comes from, the seasonality of food and how to eat healthily are also skills I use on a day-to-day basis.

Since becoming a father 4 years ago, I was keen to pass these skills onto my son (and now my daughter) to make sure they live a healthy life and make good choices when it comes to their diets. I also remember watching Jamie Oliver many years when he went on his famous ‘Turkey Twizzler’ campaign and I was shocked about how little vast amounts of children understand about the food they eat. This has stuck with me and I really wanted to use my passion for food in a productive way and having my own children made me really want to help others as best I can.

Can you explain a bit more about what the charity will do?

Table Talk Foundation has two main objectives.

The first is to provide food education to children in Sussex. We will provide grants to primary schools in Sussex to fund the ‘Adopt a School’ programme which is run by the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts. They have been running these classes for 40 years and have the expertise in this field. There are five sessions run over the course of a school year and these include bread making, food seasons and even visiting a farm to understand food providence.

Our second objective is to help members, past or present, of the hospitality sector who have fallen upon hard times. To help us with this, we have teamed up with Hospitality Action who are a national charity who have been going since 1837!

Why is this important?

Providing food education to children is massively important to help them make better choices when it comes to their diet. Children are a blank canvass and will soak up knowledge if it taught in the right way.

Childhood obesity has more than doubled over the past 10 years. 1 in 3 children are classed as overweight or obese by the time they finish primary school. This then leads into adult obesity with just over 60% of the UK adult population being classified as overweight or obese.

This has a knock-on effect to wider society. We spend more treating obesity on the NHS than we spend on the police force, fire service and judicial system combined! This is a worrying trend that needs to be broken.

We want to teach kids in a fun and holistic way which can also inspire them to join the hospitality sector after education. As with my story, even spending a few years in the sector can give life skills that you could not get anywhere else.

In then makes sense for us to try and support members of the hospitality sector and that’s where Hospitality Action comes in. It is an industry that has so many high points but it’s no secret that people in hospitality work long hours in high pressure environments and this can take its toll on mental health. There are also high levels of addiction issues in the sector whether this is alcohol abuse, drug abuse or gambling.

We will be providing grants to Hospitality Action to help them carry out their work. This involves proving short term grants to people to help pay for utility bills, proving a counselling service for people to access or providing winter fuel grants for retired members of the sector.

You have an impressive list of trustees involved; how did you choose them?

There are 9 trustees in total and each person has their own strengths. One thing we all have in common is a love for food, drink and hospitality.

We have a food expert with TV chef and restaurateur, Mark Sargeant and a drink expert with Tamara Roberts who is CEO of Ridgeview Wine. We also have Tom Surgey who built his reputation locally working at Ridgeview before setting up his own drink’s consultancy business.

We will be running lots of different fundraising events through the Foundation and Jess Aggarwal comes from an events management background where she worked in hospitality sector. Jess is very much a driving force in Table Talk Foundation and has been instrumental in the launch.

Then I approached business leaders that I have massive respect for. Ian Posyden, Noel Preston, Jason Edge and Chris Ketley. They are all people I have known through the local business community for several years and people I trust to help us with our cause.

What are you hoping to achieve in thelonger term?

We just want to provide fun, educational cooking classes to as many children in Sussex as we possibly can. To help us do this, we will be looking to recruit a full-time chef teacher to deliver the Adopt a School programme for us.

We think by getting children engaged with food at an early age will lead to them making better food choices in later life which can help fight the obesity crisis we have in this country.

We would love to create a ‘Table Talk Foundation Training Syllabus’ which schools can adopt. We see this working all the way from primary schools to secondary schools as well as creating engagement with parents.

If this is successful, there is no reason why we could not replicate this across more counties.

How can the Sussex business community help?

As I mentioned above, we are going to be running some amazing fundraising events and each one will have a food/drink theme. So, any business owners that are ‘foodies’, these are not to be missed so please support these by buying tickets.

If you like what we do, why not make us your charity partner for the year? We will support anything that you do to raise money for the foundation whether that is a bake sale to a sky dive!

Finally, just spreading the word is important for us as a new charity! Follow us on social media and share our content.

How can people in Sussex find out more?

Our website is the best place to find our more and keep up to date with the events. Our website address in www.tabletalk-foundation.com.

We are also on all the social media sites so just search for ‘Table Talk Foundation’ and you should find us!