The Purpose Precinct
More than 100 Victorian social enterprises have now been part of the Purpose Precinct, an Australian-first initiative that brings together social enterprises across multiple spaces at Melbourne’s iconic Queen Victoria Market and beyond. The precinct nurtures ideas and innovation, providing opportunity for social enterprises to retail on site, launch new products, kickstart new businesses, or take part in state-wide incubation and enterprise development.
Alongside multiple retail and activation spaces, and a cafe by social enterprise STREAT, the precinct includes the Moving Feast Kitchen, bringing innovation to solving the problem of food waste. The kitchen works with market stallholders to divert overripe or undersold produce for resale as long shelf-life products, with a 98% success rate.
Moving Feast Eco-Chefs Chris Locke and Fernando Minervini experiment with discarded bread to come up with two solutions - high-quality ‘bread-waste pasta’ with eggs and flour added, and traditional Armenian lavosh crackers. In other innovations, overripe mangoes become mango hot sauce and kombucha. Old sweet potatoes are transformed into sweet potato miso and shoyu, sold in the precinct and served at the STREAT cafe.
“There’s a beautiful simplicity in re-diverting food that doesn’t have to go into the ground,” says STREAT Deputy CEO Elise Bennetts, who works in the kitchen.
“There are so many issues in our food systems and so much food insecurity. Farmers struggle to grow food, only to see it go back into the ground. We can’t feed the whole state but we can solve small problems in different ways, and pilot something that can potentially be scaled. There is huge potential here.”
Launched in late 2022 by Good Cycles and STREAT with support from SENVIC Social Enterprise Network Victoria and funded through the Victorian Government’s Social Enterprise Strategy, the Purpose Precinct has a dual focus on the circular economy and providing on and off-site employment and training pathways for disadvantaged jobseekers facing multiple barriers to finding work.
