Social Bite
Social Bite is a movement to end homelessness.
We are a charity and social business providing homes, jobs, food, and support to empower people to transform their own lives.
Our vision is a society where no one should have to be homeless. We challenge the status quo by pioneering solutions that create lasting change.
Social Bite began life as a small coffee shop in Edinburgh, Scotland, in August 2012. We became involved in the homelessness issue when a young homeless man named Peter came into the coffee shop one day to ask us for a job.
When we offered this young man employment, this was the origin of an unexpected 10 years of charitable work and campaigning on the homelessness issue. We believe in the power of supportive employment to transform people’s lives; our ongoing aim is for 1 in 4 of our team to have come from a background of homelessness.
We started to offer more jobs to people experiencing homelessness as we got more engaged in the issue. After a few months, we introduced a “Pay it Forward” system in the coffee shops where customers could buy some food in advance for people experiencing homelessness to get later on.
Good food has always been at the heart of what we do. This has led to us becoming a major employer of people experiencing homelessness and extreme barriers to employment, as well as one of the largest providers of free freshly made free food in the UK to those in need. We normally provide over 180,000 items of food and hot drinks every year through our network of coffee shops and distributed over 800,000 food packs during the recent pandemic. We also have a restaurant, Vesta Bar & Kitchen, formerly called ‘Home’, which opened in 2016 and which provides weekly sit-down meals for an average of 40 people experiencing homelessness and food poverty, as well as training opportunities for our supported employees.
