Amgueddfa Cymru Food Festival

On 7th and 8th September, SAFE attended Amgueddfa Cymru, an annual food festival held at St Fagans National Museum of History. The event showcases food and drink businesses from across Wales, celebrating local produce and innovation.

Our volunteers served teas and coffees, painted faces, and sold vintage clothing in our Ethical Boutique tent, raising over £1300 for our international projects!!

Volunteers received coffee training and experience in customer service, retail and money handling through the Conscious Coffee bus, Betty, and Ethical Boutique clothes stall, not to mention honing their creative skills through face painting queues of excited children (and adults!).

We are proud to have been awarded the Street Food Trader of the Year Award by Amgueddfa Cymru, the judges interviewed each trader about their environmental impact and their wider social objectives. We told them all about our Conscious Coffee barista school, which travels around Wales providing free training for young people, long term unemployed, and those from an asylum seeking/refugee background. Our volunteer development program nurtures and empowers people from all backgrounds to engage with their community and help make the world a SAFE-r place.

As part of our Global Citizenship Program, we spoke with festival attendees about Fairtrade and the varying impacts of the manufacturing processes of clothing materials on the environment. We gathered data in the form of tally charts, on people’s familiarity with Fairtrade, and the materials that their clothing was made of, and spoke about the choices we all can make to move towards more environmentally positive purchases. One of our volunteers, Sam from Swansea, researched and designed the activity. “During my research I was surprised by how negatively impactful many materials are on the environment during their manufacturing processes. I found that linen was by far the most environmentally friendly material, as it uses far less water and land to grow than cotton”

To limit our environmental impact across the weekend, we utilised ride sharing and public transport where possible to get to and from the event. Our Tea and Coffee bus is fitted with Solar Panels which power the lights, sink pump, and chargers for phones and tills, and all of our packaging is compostable.

We used Fairtrade sugar and tea, organic oat milk, and registered B-Corp coffee and hot chocolate. The vegetables used in our delicious cakes were grown by Cae Calon OPD and baked by our wonderful team mate, Caz!