Building Communities One Fridge at a Time
With 700 community fridges and counting across the UK, and 24 million meals shared in 2024 alone, the Community Fridge Network is a mind-blowingly simple solution for tackling food waste, with seemingly endless co-benefits. When we heard it had outgrown its digital fridge map, we knew we had to design an equally elegant and sustainable solution to empower the network to learn, scale and adapt.
Great work starts with a shared ethos
Hubbub’s mission - to make environmental action make sense for people, communities and businesses - resonates strongly with our own. So when we saw their shout-out for a team to develop a digital map for their Community Fridge Network, we jumped.
We knew that the new map needed to not just support the thriving community, but enable growth, so it needed to be accessible, easy to update and live, so everyone knows the latest on what’s inside each fridge and what’s going on around each fridge. From community events to volunteer opportunities, from finding a local fridge to setting up a new fridge, flexing the frontend and backend for dynamic data sets was key.
Not the easiest challenge but helping communities flourish through smart, human-centred tech is exactly the kind of project Big Lemon lives for. So we leaned into our community-centric mindset, embracing a collaborative problem-solving effort from the start. And we expanded the consultancy phase into a deeper discovery process, we kept a keen eye on the slimline budget, future-proofing tech decisions on Hubbub’s behalf.
The result? A living, breathing example of our ethos: a design-smart, scalable solution that uses tech where it matters most, and supports Hubbub’s green charity mission.
Sustainable tech solutions for grassroots climate action
On the tech front, the challenge was twofold: create a front-end map that allowed live information sharing while retaining smooth, responsive performance; and build an accessible, user-friendly back end that encouraged a wide range of users to keep their fridge information up to date.
A deeply complex challenge, but a dream project for our Owen. He cast the net wide, looking for budget-conscious, evergreen tech solutions that would meet the Community Fridge Network’s needs now and allow scaling in the future.
Hubbub had been using an outdated map embedded within their website. It was clunky, hard to find and tricky to use. We knew the map needed to become a standalone, discoverable tool to extend the network’s reach and make a real impact. We chose Mapbox’s Geocoding API because it supports structured geolocation searches that map to real places, allowing us to augment the dataset with fridge records and providing a seamless integration - ideal for our needs.
We loved every moment of our open-minded collaboration. Big Lemon took the time to deeply understand our needs, explained everything thoroughly and explored every possibility transparently. And they ensured we were empowered to confidently take ownership when handing over.”
Hubbub
On the backend, Hubbub had been using Airtable to store information about the fridge groups. But the data was outdated, with no clear system for updating or prompting fridge groups to make changes. Rather than building a solution for a system that wasn’t right in the first place, we decided to do things the Big Lemon way - we built an integration with Airtable to keep the fridges in sync in our database. On the backend, we opted for Softr, a no-code tool, to allow fridge managers to keep their fridge settings up to date.
We set up Softr to push updates through to the map every three hours - anyone searching for a fridge could easily find what they were looking for, making the service more accessible. Here at Big Lemon, we have the pleasure of seeing live updates made to the map, and can proudly report watching a dramatic uptick in traction - there are now around 400 fridges in operation.
A key principle behind all our software decisions was sustainability - not just environmental, but operational. We deliberately avoided locking Hubbub into expensive software contracts or creating dependencies on us for ongoing maintenance. Instead, we built training into our service, empowering their team to manage and evolve the platform independently, free from unexpected costs or complexity.
And that is how we build community - one fridge and one sustainable tech solution at a time.
