A Brief Histroy

The core members of Social Pickle met in 2020 as volunteers of the Foodhall project, a community hub and social eating space that operated in Sheffield. We often found ourselves creatively dealing with the surplus of the project’s ingredients - which were already donated and acquired as surplus! Witnessing food insecurity in the city, we wanted to put passions for food preservation into action.

Our very first project worked with urban apple gluts, both foraged and donated from the city’s trees. We created a raw apple cider vinegar and bottled it up into a pay-what-you-can product for market, that could be used to communicate our ideas and get to know the food systems we existed within. 

From there we set up regular Glut Clubs, collaborated with other organisations and events, and slowly consolidated Sheffield’s interest in food preservation into an annual Pickle Fest that grew exponentially each year, hosting community judged competitions, workshops, music and talks.

When we were operating from FoodHall, Social Pickle had a larger network of volunteers who also took up responsibilities, tending to the active fermentation vessels in our “laboratory”, welcoming new members into the wider community, feeding in ideas and sharing our accumulated knowledge with the public. 

Since those early days Social Pickle has taken various forms and now exists as a satellite collective. While we currently have no fixed base or consistent roles for volunteers, we do still seek to embed deeply with the communities that we work with, and new projects will always bring with them new volunteer opportunities for which we will advertise through our volunteer database, newsletter and social media.