Crumbs! What a tasty way to save the environment

One of Cumbria’s oldest food producers is urging visitors to the Lake District to ‘go green’ by eating a tasty residue of its traditional baking process.

The 156-year-old Grasmere Gingerbread Shop is selling bags of its sought-after gingerbread crumbs to raise money for conservation projects.

Entitled ‘Leave No Crumbs’, the campaign is designed to raise thousands of pounds for charity Nurture Lakeland over the next few years.

‘Chefs, local restaurants and regular customers have always asked us for crumbs for recipes. They are a natural by-product of our baking process’, said shop manager Joanne Wilson, who lives with her family in Castletown, Penrith.

‘The idea of ‘Leave No Crumbs’ started out as an anti-litter message, therefore leaving the landscape as you found it.

‘We were then approached by Nurture Lakeland to support its work in conservation and it seemed a great way of helping it to protect the national park which so many of us rely upon for our livelihoods’.

The Grasmere Gingerbread Shop sells bags of crumbs for £2. From now on it will donate £1 per bag to Nurture Lakeland.

‘I’ve been asking the bakers to work out how many bags of crumbs we generate in a year’, added Joanne. ‘They are still doing the calculations but it is certainly more than one thousand’.

Celebrity chefs including Jamie Oliver and Cumbria’s Peter Sidwell, as well as local restaurants the Wild Boar and Log House, use Grasmere Gingerbread crumbs in dishes.

Tiffany Solender, of Nurture Lakeland, thanked Grasmere Gingerbread for its support. ‘As a charity working with visitors and tourism-related businesses it’s fantastic to have one of our most iconic brands on board’, she said.

‘Its corporate membership of Nurture Lakeland is a great boost for us and I hope it encourages even more local businesses to sign up to a fantastic cause’.