Abstract
Food insecurity is a growing problem affecting almost 10% of average-income households and 22% of households at risk of poverty in Europe. A citizen-led answer has been in the form of social eating initiatives: Citizens using surplus food to cook nutritious meals to eat together for a reasonable price. Therefore, these initiatives tackle food insecurity and food waste, while also combatting loneliness and improving social cohesion. Being a promising way of compensating for the failure of the traditional food system, we need to further investigate these initiatives. Previous research has mainly focused on mapping the positive outcomes. However, how these initiatives can effectively attain these outcomes remains unclear. This study addresses this gap by answering the following research question: What key factors contribute to the success of a social eating initiatives from a systems perspective? Using participatory group model building, we have built systems maps together with five different initiatives. These maps were consolidated into one general map, which we finetuned in a second session to be able to formulate action ideas together with the initiatives. We propose that key factors contributing to social eating initiative’s success fall into 4 broader categories: Infrastructure, internal dynamics, guest accessibility, and food quality. The action ideas for improving initiative success target key factors in these categories. This study offers an effective guide for policy makers looking to stimulate social eating initiatives for their many positive effects on the neighbourhood community.