Articles

The Plastic-Free Pantry: How Buying in Bulk Cuts Your Waste

Plastic Free July starts in the kitchen cupboard.

Want to cut your household plastic without overhauling your whole life? Start with the pantry. Buying staples in bigger bags — and refilling rather than re-buying — slashes the number of plastic wrappers, pots and bottles passing through your bin, and almost always works out cheaper per 100g too. Here’s how to build a lower-waste, lower-cost store cupboard with our Sussex Wholefoods range, just in time for Plastic Free July.

Camping Cupboard: Lightweight Wholefoods for Tent Cooking

What’s the best food to take camping? Lightweight dry wholefoods that cook fast in one pan: oats, couscous, red lentils, pasta and dried fruit. They need no fridge, weigh little, and turn into proper hot meals with nothing but a camp stove and boiling water.

Here’s how to build a camping cupboard that feeds you well for a weekend — or a fortnight — with recipes from our own kitchen adapted for life under canvas.

Suitcase Snacks: Healthy Eating on Planes, Trains and Road Trips

What are the best healthy snacks for travelling? In short: nuts, seeds, dried fruit, oat-based bars and rice cakes — foods that need no fridge, survive heat, pass airport security and actually keep you full.

Below, we break down exactly what to pack for every kind of journey, what survives a hot car (and what doesn’t), and the make-ahead recipes we rely on ourselves — all from ingredients you can stock up on in one order.

Game, Set, Snack: A Healthier Wimbledon Spread You Can Make at Home

Strawberries, cream and a centre-court spread — all made at home.

For two weeks each summer, the nation rearranges its schedule around grass-court tennis. The radio commentary drifts through open windows, the strawberries appear by the punnet, and somewhere between the first serve and the final tie-break, the inevitable question lands: what are we going to eat? Wimbledon and food are old doubles partners. An estimated couple of million strawberries disappear at the Championships every year, drowned in cream and chased down with something fizzy. It is a glorious tradition, and the good news is you can recreate the best of it at home for a fraction of Centre Court prices.

Here is our take on a few Wimbledon-inspired dishes: a spread of recipes that capture the strawberries-and-cream spirit of the fortnight, made at home with ingredients you can keep in the cupboard. Some happen to be lighter or plant-based, others are simply our favourite way to enjoy the classics. Below you will find our favourite warm-weather recipes from the Healthy Supplies kitchen, plus the store-cupboard staples that make each one work. Pull up a deckchair.

Whole, Flaked, Ground or Blitzed: A Cook’s Guide to Every Form of Almond

One nut, six ingredients — and how to use each one well.

Walk down any health food aisle and you’ll find the almond wearing half a dozen different disguises: whole and skin-on, blanched, flaked, ground into flour, blitzed into butter, even pressed into milk. They’re all the same nut — but each form behaves completely differently in the kitchen, and choosing the right one is the difference between a recipe that works and one that disappoints.

This guide walks through every form of almond, what it’s best at, and the recipes from our own kitchen that show each one at its finest.

The Nut-Free Hero: Why Pumpkin Seeds Deserve a Permanent Place in Your Kitchen

Everything a nut can do — welcome where nuts are banned.

Every nut-free household knows the frustration: so many of the “healthy snack” staples — trail mixes, nut butters, pestos, energy bars — are built on nuts. School lunchbox policies make it harder still, with most UK schools now operating strict no-nut rules.

Enter the pumpkin seed. These flat green kernels (also called pepitas) do almost everything a nut can do — crunch, richness, protein, healthy fats — while being a seed, and therefore welcome where nuts are banned. Better yet, they’re one of the most mineral-dense foods you can buy at any price. Here’s how to make them the hardest-working ingredient in your kitchen, with recipes from our own collection for every job.

The Dairy-Free Kitchen Starts with a Bag of Cashews

Cream, cheese, milk and ice cream — all from one humble nut.

Ask anyone who cooks dairy-free what their single most important ingredient is, and the answer is rarely a speciality product from the free-from aisle. It’s the humble cashew. Soaked and blended, cashews transform into cream, milk, soft cheese, frosting and ice cream so convincingly that dinner guests routinely refuse to believe there’s no dairy involved.

If you’re newly dairy-free — or cooking for someone who is — this guide will take you from a plain bag of cashews to a complete dairy-free repertoire, with tried-and-tested recipes from our kitchen at every step.

Beyond the Pudding: A Complete Cook’s Guide to Chia Seeds

One bag, a dozen jobs — the cook’s guide to chia.

If your bag of chia seeds only ever comes out for the occasional overnight pudding, you’re missing most of what this remarkable little seed can do. Chia is one of the most quietly versatile ingredients in the store cupboard: it thickens, binds, sets, replaces eggs, turns fruit into jam without cooking, and slips invisibly into bakes, smoothies and breakfast bowls.

In this guide we’ll walk through chia’s kitchen superpowers one by one — with tried-and-tested recipes from our own kitchen for every technique.

5 Store-Cupboard Swaps That Save You Money

Same cupboard, same cooking, noticeably smaller food bill.

With food prices still creeping up, it’s tempting to think eating well has to cost more. In our experience, it’s usually the opposite: the biggest savings come from swapping heavily-branded, over-packaged products for honest, single-ingredient wholefoods that you buy once and use again and again.

We pack all of the ingredients below under our own Sussex Wholefoods range, right here in Sussex. Here are five simple swaps to start with – each one lowers your cost per serving, keeps for ages in the cupboard and cuts down on food waste too.

Sunflower Seeds: The Underrated Powerhouse

A little ingredient that quietly earns its place in the cupboard.

Sunflower seeds tend to live a quiet life in the cupboard. They’re not flashy. They don’t get the press that chia or hemp gets. There’s no wellness influencer dedicated to their cause. And yet, we’d argue they’re one of the most useful, affordable, and genuinely good-for-you ingredients you can have on hand.

We pack a lot of them under our Sussex Wholefoods range, and they’re the kind of thing we keep reaching for in our own kitchens. So here’s a proper look at why we love them, what they actually do for you, and how to use them without overthinking it.