Sodexo Stop Hunger Foundation Poetry Competition 2025-26

Inspire children to write a poem about fruits and vegetables and make a difference! Let's champion literacy and prevent future food poverty together!

Have you ever REALLY looked at a carrot? Or a strawberry? Or broccoli?

🥕 🍓 🥦

They're just food, right? Things you eat (or avoid eating!). But look closer... Poetry helps us notice things we usually rush past.

A watermelon is a drum wrapped in green stripes. Broccoli is a tiny forest. A strawberry wears its seeds on the outside like jewels. Every fruit and vegetable has a story—how it grows, what it looks like, how it tastes, where it comes from.

This is a competition bringing together Sodexo colleagues and their families, schools and communities, to shine a light on the link between what feeds our bodies and what feeds our minds. Chapter One and the Sodexo Stop Hunger Foundation invite you to write short, 5-line poems that celebrate fruits and vegetables.

Make them funny. Make them serious. Make them strange. Make them delicious.

Your poem could be about your favourite snack or the vegetable you hide under your fork. It could be about colours, textures, smells, or tastes. It could give vegetables voices or tell the story of a fruit's journey from seed to plate.

What will you discover when you stop and really look?

Find out more and enter!

🥦 If you’re a Sodexo employee and/or a member of the Sodexo Family & Carers Network click here to find out more

🍉 If you’re one of our specially selected schools (a Sodexo/AiP operated or a Chapter One partner school) click here to find out more

It all starts with literacy.

About the Chapter One and Sodexo Stop Hunger Foundation partnership

The Sodexo Stop Hunger Foundation is an employee-led independent registered charity focusing on tackling food insecurity and its root causes in the UK and Ireland. Its activities go beyond food aid, with the aim of giving a hand up to break the cycle of poverty and food insecurity to anyone in need.

Sodexo Stop Hunger Foundation is a Chapter One Platinum Partner funding and supporting 130 Sodexo employees as Online Reading Volunteers over the 2025-26 school year. Chapter One provides one-to-one reading support to primary school children facing disadvantage, helping break the cycle of food poverty through literacy.