Social Bite

Social Bite began life as a small cafe in Edinburgh, Scotland, in August 2012. We became involved in the homelessness issue, when a young homeless man named Peter Hart came into the cafe one day to ask us for a job. When we offered this young man employment, this was the origin of an unexpected 9 years of charitable work and campaigning on the homelessness issue.

We started to offer more homeless people jobs, as we got more engaged in the issue. After a few months, we introduced a “Pay it Forward” system in the cafes where customers could buy some food in advance for homeless people to get later on.

This has led to us becoming a major employer of homeless people as well as the largest provider of free freshly made free food in the UK to those in need.  We normally give out over 140,000 items of food and hot drinks every year through our network of cafes and have distributed over 540,000 food packs during the pandemic alone. We also have a restaurant, Vesta Bar & Kitchen, formerly called ‘Home’, which opened in 2016 and which provides weekly sit down meals for 40 people experiencing homelessness and food poverty, as well as training opportunities for our supported employees.