Healthy neighbourhood kitchens deliver roughly €1 million in value per location

The question and background

Following up on a Dutch parliamentary amendment, the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Food Security and Nature (LVVN) made funding available to Stichting Public Food in 2025 for the further development of Mensa Mensa and to explore scaling to other cities. New Economy carried out this impact assessment as part of that process. The central question: what is the social value of the Mensa Mensa concept, and how do the benefits compare to the costs?

Mensa Mensa has four main goals: health (access to healthy, nutritious meals), wellbeing (affordable meals that reduce financial stress), social cohesion (meeting places that reduce loneliness) and sustainability (less waste, shorter chains and more plant-based food). The analysis also examines the fit with three LVVN policy goals: encouraging sustainable consumption including food skills, strengthening the link between citizens and food production, and accelerating the protein transition towards more plant-based protein.

A food environment under pressure

Food insecurity in the Netherlands is not a matter of scarcity, but of access, affordability and everyday room to manoeuvre. In an I&O Research survey, 14% of households report insufficient access to healthy and adequate food. Nibud finds that 32% of Dutch people struggle to make ends meet; within that group, 80% struggle with groceries. In 2025, 155,600 people used one of 181 food banks. In Amsterdam, 18% of respondents experience low or very low food security, 27% have insufficient money for a healthy meal, and 11% sometimes or often skip a meal.

The consequences reach beyond hunger. Within the RIVM determinant framework, unhealthy diet is linked to 8.1% of the disease burden, roughly 12,900 deaths and roughly €6 billion in direct healthcare spending per year. Roughly 26% of the population feels socially isolated, 9% severely so. Food waste in 2023 was roughly 2,271 kilotonnes, or 127 kg per person, and the protein transition is progressing at roughly 1% shift per year — too slow for the 2030 targets.

Three lenses on the social cost

How large is the challenge without a facility like Mensa Mensa? Three calculation lenses approach the same starting position from different angles. They overlap partly and cannot simply be added together.

The three baseline lenses cannot be added together. QALY: one year in full health.

Translated to a neighbourhood, the social burden for 1,000 low-income residents adds up quickly: roughly €1.17–1.48 million per year in the shadow-price lens, roughly €1.61–3.03 million in the cost approach, and roughly €5–10 million in the broad QALY lens. That is the comparison point for the value of a single location.

The approach and three data layers

The analysis combines literature review, fieldwork, data analysis and scenario analysis. A fixed calculation structure compares a modelled standard location with the baseline scenario. Data from the Rotterdam pilot was combined with information on the new Amsterdam-Zuidoost location, supplemented with fieldwork and literature. Where different figure types sit side by side, the analysis distinguishes three layers that cannot be substituted for one another: practice data (current monitoring and operational records), target data (intended reach and KPIs from the 2026–2027 impact framework), and model data (the calculated, modelled standard location, used as the basis for comparison and monetisation).

The calculation distinguishes benefit-cost ratios on total programme costs and on public investment. Full parameters, calculation rules, overlap corrections and scenario assumptions are set out in the report appendices.

Seven activities

Mensa Mensa comprises up to seven possible components. The basic location impact consists of the first four; corporate catering is read separately as a revenue model and cross-financing, the food boxes as two optional modules, and the community programme sits outside the headline results.

• Neighbourhood restaurant — a daily, low-threshold eating facility and meeting place; fixed consumer price €5.00 per 565g.
• Mealprep — a guided group activity where participants cook a week’s meals together to take home.
• Mealprep Junior — a children’s and youth programme focused on early food skills.
• “Chefs of the 21st Century” traineeship — a practical route towards work, training and self-reliance.
• Food boxes — two variants: a general home-cooking route and a targeted “Food on Prescription” route.
• Corporate catering — a commercial arm that helps fund the social core and normalises healthy, plant-based food.
• Activation and community programme — a neighbourhood programme around connection and participation.

Rotterdam practice provides the measurement base. In the reporting period, 4,314 visitors were registered, average spend was €7.18 including VAT, and 18% of visitors were recognised as returning customers. Payment analysis shows an average transaction of €7.90, with 33.9% of transactions under €5.

Net social value

For the modelled standard location, year-1 benefits are indicatively roughly €1.03 million against roughly €0.33 million in costs. Within the basic location impact, roughly €0.70 million in net value remains, with an overall benefit-cost ratio of roughly 3.2. Including long-term effects, net value rises to roughly €0.83 million (conservative) and €1.48 million (ambitious). On public investment alone — roughly €210,000 per year, excluding own revenue and internal catering coverage — the benefit-cost ratio is roughly 4.9 in year 1, 5.5 conservative and 8.6 ambitious.

Basic location impact: neighbourhood restaurant, Mealprep, Mealprep Junior and traineeship. Food boxes and corporate catering valued separately. Figures rounded.

In year 1, benefits are largest in reduced financial stress (roughly €371,000) and health and vitality (roughly €301,000); together these two categories form about two-thirds of the monetised core value. Social cohesion adds roughly €164,000, avoided public costs roughly €162,000, and sustainability roughly €32,000. Together this comes to roughly €1,029,000 in benefits within the basic location impact.

The social shadow price of food

The social shadow price of food captures the hidden cost of a meal: the health and environmental damage that never appears on the receipt. Cheap-looking convenience food is not automatically a social bargain. The shadow price separates three layers — consumer price, technical shadow price on a harmonised 565g reference, and origin — and shows what food really costs.

Social shadow price per meal type, technical 565g comparison. Ultra-processed and fast food shown without soft drinks.

The Mensa Mensa plate costs €5.00, below fast food (€11.83) and the ultra-processed convenience reference (€6.04 at 565g), but above simple home meals. In social shadow price, the Mensa Mensa plate comes out at roughly €0.46, almost identical to the Wheel of Five reference (€0.47), lower than a plant-based meal (€0.56), and clearly lower than ultra-processed convenience food (€2.78), fast food (€2.83) and red meat (€3.26). Affordability is therefore not only about the till price but also about portion size and the hidden social price of food. The €5.00 consumer price is not the same as the cost price: the Rotterdam cost base is roughly €16.14 per meal, and the target-profile cost base roughly €10.98.

Five directions for scaling the food environment

Solutions for the food environment require change in two directions at once: building up new, healthy practices and phasing out unhealthy patterns. Five scenarios range from experimenting and accelerating to anchoring and consolidating.

Scenarios 1–4 per location per year; scenario 5 per person per year (one healthy meal per day, low-income route). Indicative orders of magnitude.

The scenarios serve different functions and are not a ranking. Scenario 2 is the strongest environmental route and reinforces exactly the areas where the baseline scenario weighs heaviest. Scenario 3 offers the strongest combination of replicability, shared infrastructure and high return, and serves as a scaling model for other locations. Scenario 1 is the strongest prevention route, with the largest health benefits. Scenario 4 achieves the highest ratio but offers less assurance on quality, monitoring and attribution. Scenario 5 is not a model for a single location but a direction for broader food access.

Recommendations

1. Maintain affordability with a sharp product mix and continued public investment. Price discipline, transparency about origin and targeted support for low-income residents should be developed together.
2. Clarify what happens on-site, and what continues at home or through care. A core location for connection and healthy eating, a home-cooking route for daily self-reliance, and a targeted route for those needing extra support.
3. Treat follow-up modules as full-fledged routes. Mealprep Junior grows in the long term to roughly €70,000–325,000; the home-cooking and Food on Prescription routes add demonstrable value.
4. Model new locations first on a simple three-year growth path. Programme costs, operational revenue, growth contribution and remaining funding need are not the same thing.
5. Let commercial growth contribute, but not steer. Corporate catering can help fund the social core, provided the commercial component keeps serving the social goal.

Contribution to public policy goals

Mensa Mensa is not a complete solution to the baseline scenario, but it is a scalable answer to a challenge that quickly runs into the millions for 1,000 low-income residents in a neighbourhood. The basic location impact delivers 28,200 healthy meals, 5,139 kg of rescued food and 24,960 plant-based meal equivalents per year, plus roughly 210 net valued hours of coaching and food-skills teaching. This connects the concept to the three LVVN goals around sustainable consumption, the link with food production, and the protein transition. Social value emerges from the combination of access, routine, skills and social embedding, and is replicable in other urban contexts under the right conditions.

Method and sources