Victorious In The Community – Fries Love win the Neighbourhood Eats Award for 2023

We’re back! And we’re so excited to tell you more about what’s going on with Victorious in the Community.

2023 was a fantastic year with more than £173,347 donated by Victorious to good causes.

We supported many wonderful local charities and community groups with donations and event support but that’s not all… we’ve been growing our support for local foodies by subsidising pitches for local eateries and rewarding our best local businesses with our Neighbourhood Eats and People’s Choice Awards.

Victorious is the largest metropolitan music festival in the UK and each year our Southsea-based in-house concessions team, organises one of the biggest and widest range of festival concessions in the country, providing opportunities for hundreds of businesses to showcase their offerings to thousands of festival-goers.

Victorious 2023 saw more than 100 caterers and more than 80 market traders come together for the glorious Bank Holiday Weekend.

Everyone who visits Victorious can eat like a local and experience the amazing food on offer in our hometown. In 2022 we launched Neighbourhood Eats; a space in the festival created specifically for our local eateries. Implemented after recognising our wonderful caterers in the city who may wish to be involved in the festival, but perhaps not used to trading at large-scale events or able to afford standard festival pitch fees. By subsidising the pitch fees, we make the chance to trade at the festival easier and more accessible for Portsmouth businesses to get involved.

The Neighbourhood Eats Award was created as a further way to boost local businesses. This award recognises a local food business who we believe is an asset to the local community. The award rewards the winner with a free pitch for the following year, which allows them to develop their business further in the event catering sector and push the boundaries of what they do.

Previous winners include local favourite’s Natty’s Jerk Chicken and Southsea Deli, and we are thrilled to reveal the 2023 winner is Fries Love! Their clear passion for cooking and attention to flavour made them an easy choice for this year’s champs.

Speaking about Victorious, Fries Love’s business owners Anna and Jack said: “Victorious Festival – our first big festival when we started the business. In 2019 Fries Love wasn’t known by anyone, however, Victorious Festival gave us a massive chance and welcomed us to their event.

"It was an amazing opportunity to start, grow and be recognised by the local community. At the core of Victorious Festival are fantastic people who continuously support small businesses and understand their needs. We are so grateful to be part of this event.’’

In addition, in 2023 we decided to roll out The People’s Choice Award, where patrons of local businesses could vote for their favourite local catering business to win a free pitch in the Neighbourhood Eats area, meaning we could ensure the community has a say in what is on offer at their hometown festival too.

We’ve had such a great response from local caterers that for 2024 we’re upping the number of awards to 3, to help even more local businesses make the most of the festival opportunity on their doorstep! This is just the beginning, and the initiative is looking to get even bigger year after year based on the positive response from the local community.

Looking beyond the festival we also work with our local food banks, a relationship we are looking forward to developing even more in the coming years and they collected huge amounts of fresh and frozen food items and were able to collect enough food to provide over 250 meals to our local communities including Food Sweet to Insight (The RC Cathedral food service), Lifehouse, Sunday Suppers, Buckland URC, and other food service providers that cater for those who otherwise would not eat.

We look forward to working with these charities and donating even more food that would otherwise have gone to waste in future years.