City council leader Adam Hug visited the Abbey Centre this week

A COMMUNITY pantry is aiming to counteract stigma around food poverty.

The Abbey Centre’s Community Food Pantry, in Pimlico, provides a large amount of food to anyone in need for £4.50 a week.

Unlike most food banks there is no means-testing or referral needed.

“There’s a lot of demeaning of those who have to apply for food banks,” said the project’s co-ordinator Caz Gandy-Brown. “The fact that we treat them as customers that would go into any shop is really helpful.

“For families doing packed lunches we have lots of crisps and that kind of thing that they can put in packed lunches.”

At food banks people cannot choose the food they get.

But for £4.50 a week the pantry gives anyone from the community “the power to choose” the groceries they want.

“We’ve got people on zero-hour contracts coming in. Sometimes they have money and sometimes they don’t,” Ms Gandy-Brown said.

The pantry buys as much food as it can with the money from the membership fee and the rest from donations by both businesses and members of the public.

It has created a relationship with Brakes, the major wholesale food supplier. “I can buy big catering bags of pasta from them and then portion that down into a weekly portion of pasta or rice,” she said.

The pantry, situated behind Westminster Abbey, has translators on hand who speak 22 of the 32 languages spoken in Pimlico.

Ms Gandy-Brown said: “When people can have conversations in their mother tongue they talk more freely, more openly. People come here because of the pantry and then stay for lots more.”

The pantry is open Wednesdays and Fridays, 9am-1pm. You need to book an appointment through the website or call on 020 7222 0303.