From selling pies on Bridport market to food crusader, Tony Gibbons has been praised and recognised for bringing healthy food to struggling families.

The 'lockdown legend', whose recipe for success includes online cookery workshops and healthy ingredient deliveries, has been awarded a 2020 National Lottery Award in the Education category.

Tony, from west Dorset, set up The Friendly Food Club in 2005 to address the lack of education and confidence among struggling families about healthy and nutritious food.

He started weekly cooking workshops to encourage families to cook together, have fun and learn about nutrition at the same time. A believer in 'pester power' he set out to encourage children to persuade parents to shop smarter and embrace a healthier lifestyle.

Tony said: "The workshops were all – as we promote them – friendly, free and a bit chaotic, but not white coats or anything like that."

Carrying on through the pandemic

Following the outbreak of Covid-19, families were no longer able to meet for Tony's cooking classes. However, the 81-year-old cooked up a complete restructure of the club's free classes.

Tony and a team of volunteers created a Cookbox – each one containing all the ingredients to make healthy meals together, plus quizzes, games, facts about the food and activities to support home learning.

He encouraged recipients to share the meals they made via their social media channels in order to keep them engaged in healthy eating and nutrition, as well as socialising with other families.

By August, he had delivered more than 3,400 boxes to struggling families.

Award-winning education

Tony has been named winner of the Education category in the 2020 National Lottery Awards.

Tony said: "I am a strong believer that food is a catalyst for so many things – confidence, improved health and making friends – and that is why, thanks to the National Lottery funding, I have been able to continue my work with The Friendly Food Club and make a difference to the lives of families who need the club most."

He also received a congratulatory message from BBC Saturday Kitchen star and celebrity chef Matt Tebbutt.

Matt said: "Tony's Friendly Food Club is absolutely vital for educating and engaging so many families in the importance for healthy eating. It's also an incredible organisation for getting vulnerable people together to support one another – especially through these challenging times.

"Thanks to the National Lottery players, they have made a massive difference to the lives of so many families – well done Tony."

Continuing the good work

Tony has been awarded £3,000 in prize money to support his project – which he will be using for a special Christmas cookbox to send out to families who need it most.

In November 2016, The Friendly Food Club received £10,000 of National Lottery funding. In February 2020, the project received a National Lottery grant of £14,736, followed by a grant of £11,800 in May 2020, allowing the project to continue delivering cookboxes throughout lockdown.

The Friendly Food Club has been approached by a local funder who would like to fund the group to do some cookboxes in the Bridport area.

How it started

When Tony stopped doing the market stall in Bridport, he went on to do something similar in Boscombe market. He set up a pop-up soup kitchen there, demonstrating easy-to-make soup with ingredients donated by market traders and then got bags of ingredients for the soup, again from market traders for people to take home, and it started from there.

Tony said: "I was spotted by the Scarman Trust, who were at the time a big charity trust. It gave me a few grand to start doing workshops around the area and then took me off to Finland and Paris and places like that to talk about the work I was doing. On the back of that, I was given a national community champion award from the Department for Education."

This enabled Tony to get more funding for workshops.

Tony added: "It grew from that and I started workshops in Southbourne and Bournemouth. We've worked in Bridport, Dorchester, all over west Dorset, Weymouth and Portland.

"When I was chairman of governors at Beaminster School, I went to some government funded workshops for teachers who were trying to teach cooking. We were given white coats, blue gloves, a hat, charts, and I said, 'no, this is not the way to get food to the people who probably hated school', so we decided to do it our own way. It often looks chaotic, but we just have fun at the end of the day, people go away saying, 'that was great and I can make an omelette now'."

Tony has a wonderful team who help him at The Friendly Food Club and he would like to thank the Big Lottery Community Fund.

To find out more, search for The Friendly Food Club on Facebook and Twitter.