Food Waste Action Week 2024 Partner Event

Food Waste Action Week is Love Food Hate Waste's flagship annual campaign which brings businesses, government organisations and global partners together to support citizens to develop the tools they need to cut food waste in their homes.

As part of Food Waste Action Week 2024, WRAP is hosting an online partner event on Thursday 21 March 2024 (10:30-16:00) to bring together key stakeholders to focus on household food waste prevention in the UK.

Choose from a series of informative, thought-provoking sessions delivered by WRAP experts and industry professionals.

Hear new insights, quiz the experts, challenge each other, and collaborate.

Insights to help you in your quest to tackle household food waste

With lots of varying sessions available, there’s something for everyone. Whether you work for a grower, supplier, retailer or manufacturer, a local or national government or a charity or NGO, there’ll be plenty to learn and help you in your quest to tackle household food waste. 

• Join WRAP experts to find out why tackling household food waste is so critical if we’re to achieve the Courtauld Commitment target of meeting SDG12.3 and identify where your organisation, and you personally, can have real impact.
• Listen to new insights and research from WRAP's citizen food waste tracker, and “Unpacking uncut fresh fruit and veg: A UK Behavioural Insights Study” to learn more about how you can better engage your customers and communities on buying loose, to help reduce household food waste; 
• Find out more about how we’ve developed Food Waste Action Week using our latest research and insights to raise citizen awareness around the benefits of buying fresh produce loose; 
• Join industry leaders who will be demonstrating what supermarkets are doing to tackle the barriers to selling loose fruit and vegetables in store; and
• With the roll-out of household food waste recycling on the horizon, there’s an opportunity to use this change not only to divert food waste away from residual bins, but to also reduce the overall amount of food wasted. During our afternoon session we’ll showcase recent research findings, alongside our exploration of how messaging and communications can be linked/ combined to influence both food waste recycling and food waste prevention.

A key highlight of the day will be a panel discussion chaired by Sebastian Munden, Chair of the WRAP Board. In this exclusive, invite only session, Voluntary Agreement members can listen to our cross-sector panellists share their knowledge and experiences as they discuss how can we create systemic change to accelerate progress on household food waste prevention. 

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Agenda

• Sebastian Munden, Chair, WRAP
• Tom Quested, Interim Strategic Technical Manager – Food, WRAP

Join Sebastian for the introduction to the event. This session will go through data, insights and evidence on the issue, helping us to understand why we need to tackle household food waste, why a wide range of stakeholders (people, industry and government) have an important role in preventing it, and how we can achieve a future in which our homes waste less food.

• Chaired by: Caroline Conroy - Specialist - Household Food Waste Prevention WRAP, with 
• Catherine Loader, Sustainability Specialist - Circular Economy, Waitrose
• Leona Fox, Operations Manager, Sainsbury's
• Ian Critchley, Business Unit Manager, Avery Berkel

In this session we will hear from industry on what is happening within retail to address some of the barriers to selling loose, including tackling some operational challenges as well as the intention/action gap with consumers and driving sales of loose fresh produce when it’s available.

Please note that this is a closed session for Courtauld 2030 and UK Plastics Pact signatories and invitees only.

• Bettina Gilbert, Head of Technical Support and Financial Mechanisms, WRAP
• Tom Quested, Interim Strategic Technical Manager – Food, WRAP
• Sian Morgan, Associate Specialist, WRAP Cymru
• Jamie Fleming, Communications Partner, Zero Waste Scotland
• Followed by: Harriet Lamb, CEO, WRAP who will close the event

With the roll-out of household food waste recycling on the horizon, this gives us the opportunity to use this change not only to divert food waste away from residual bins, but to also reduce the overall amount of food wasted.

This session will showcase recent research findings, alongside our exploration of how messaging and communications can be linked/combined to influence both food waste recycling and food waste prevention.

Learn more about our speakers

Harriet Lamb, CEO, WRAP

Passionate about environmental and social issues, Harriet is an experienced leader who, in the UK and globally, built the Fairtrade movement – a certification scheme that sets standards to make trade fairer, working with producers in the developing world as well as thousands of companies and retailers.

After being CEO of the UK Fairtrade Foundation and then of Fairtrade International, Harriet held the role of CEO of Ashden, an organisation that promotes just climate solutions including sustainable energy in the UK and globally, as well as leading International Alert, a peacebuilding organisation. She worked in the UK on refugee and low-pay issues and lived in India for six years.
Harriet joined WRAP as CEO in March 2023 and is looking to build strong, strategic relationships with WRAP’s key partners to scale impact.

Harriet has won several awards including a CBE, Orange Businesswoman of the Year, and Cosmopolitan EcoQueen. She was also the first woman Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, and has published two books on social and environmental movements for change.

Sebastian Munden, Chair, WRAP

Sebastian Munden has over 30 years’ experience in the fast-moving consumer products industry, creating strong competitive brands and commercial success while actively applying the principles of doing business as a force for good for all stakeholders.

He was previously chief executive of Unilever UK & Ireland where he championed collaboration between companies from different sectors to transform packaging ecosystems, eliminate waste, connect the circular economy in practice, and accelerate decarbonisation.

Prior to leading Unilever UK & Ireland, Sebastian has held senior roles in Unilever across Europe and North America, including leader of the Laundry Category for Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, before becoming head of Global Marketing Operations in 2013 supporting the COO and CEO.

Sebastian is Chair of WRAP and also Chair of Ad Net Zero, the advertising industry’s climate emergency global action programme. He has been a strong advocate for trying new approaches to secondary education, as well as for apprenticeships to get young people from more diverse backgrounds into business.

He has served on steering groups for industry associations, The Institute of Grocery Distribution, The Inclusive Economy Partnership run by the Cabinet Office, and for Movement to Work, a charity supported by many employers to introduce young people to the workplace through a life-changing placement.

Dr Tom Quested, Strategic Technical Manager: Food Waste, WRAP

In his current role, Tom works to ensure that we have an evidence-based strategy to tackle food waste in the UK and globally. In previous roles, he has focused on understanding food waste: how much is wasted, why it gets wasted and what can be done to prevent it being wasted. He advises governments, companies and organisations worldwide on these subjects, including the United Nations (UN Environment Programme and UN FAO), the European Commission, and national and regional governments.

He is a lead author on several prominent reports and academic papers. Of particular note, Household Food and Drink Waste in the UK 2012 and two associated reports contain some of the most detailed analysis of household food waste anywhere in the world. He has developed novel methods to explore wasted food in the home, applying techniques from a range of disciplines, including operational research, statistics and the social sciences. Tom is also a co-author of the Food Loss and Waste Accounting and Reporting Standard, the FUSIONS’s Manual for Quantifying Food Waste and the UNEP Food Waste Index Report 2021.

Dr Quested received his degrees in Natural Sciences and Material Science from the University of Cambridge, UK. He is an associate of the UK Operational Research Society. When not considering food waste, Tom tries to play football, rock climb and cycle like he’s still in his 20s.

Mark Roberts, Lead Analyst, WRAP

Mark’s focus is on generating actionable behavioural insights to inform the design, delivery, and evaluation of levers for change. Mark applies his behavioural science expertise holistically across the system to understand how WRAP and its partners can bring about systemic change that facilitates more sustainable behaviours and greater circularity.

Mark leads on WRAP's Sustainable Lifestyles segmentation, a tool that provides its users with the behavioural insights that are needed to design behaviour change strategies and tools. His role at WRAP has also seen him apply his behavioural science expertise to the delivery of projects, interventions and campaigns that aimed to changing how citizens buy, use, and dispose of products and packaging.

Mark has over 10 years’ experience in developing, delivering, and evaluating citizen behaviour change programmes in sustainability sector.

Jackie Bailey, Senior Campaign Manager: Food, WRAP

Jackie has worked at WRAP for over 11 years, starting her career here in the Recycle Now team and moving on to manage the Love Food Hate Waste team for the last three years.

She manages all elements of citizen-facing campaign activity relating to food, including the development and delivery of the Food Waste Action Week hero campaign and strategic direction of the brand.

Jackie has a wealth of marketing experience having managed the marketing team at CSSC Sports and Leisure, and worked in marketing functions in the theatre, local government and the YHA prior to working at WRAP.

Caroline Conroy, Senior Sector Specialist: Household Food Waste Prevention, WRAP

Caroline works with businesses to change elements within the retail environment that will prevent or reduce household food waste.

This includes updating, creating and working with retailers and brands to adopt and implement WRAPs product labelling best practices per category including date labelling (making sure that the correct label is applied and extending as long as possible or none where appropriate so that consumers can use their own judgement to decide if a product is still good to eat), open life statements (removing where possible and if necessary for quality then extending the life as long as possible and using the words “best within” to indicate it’s still safe past this time), correct storage and freezing advice (to prolong the life of products at home and give consumers the confidence to get more time out the products they buy) and monitoring and reporting on to what extent these best practice recommendations are being adopted by industry.

Another key area that can help reduce household food waste is enabling people to buy what they need so Caroline is currently working with retailers in order to sell more fresh produce loose which has the potential to reduce household food waste by around 100,000 tonnes a year while also reducing single use plastics.

Catherine Loader, Ethics & Sustainability Manager (Circular Economy), John Lewis Partnership

Catherine's role is circular economy manager and her remit includes plastics & packaging at both John Lewis and Waitrose, circular business models and circular design. She is responsible for driving the uptake of circular business models and products and working across both brands to reduce and improve our packaging.

Prior to joining the Partnership, Catherine worked in various sustainability roles in companies including ASOS, Burberry and Beyond Retro.

Leona Fox, Loss Prevention Project Manager, Sainsbury's

Within loss prevention Leona reviews shrink performance looking at ways to eliminate and reduce theft as well as product protection across Fresh Food, Produce, Food Service and Goods On Line.

Leona first started at Sainsbury's 23 years ago, working in stores across all levels up to store management. Before joining Loss Prevention she was a zonal manager driving commerciality and compliance across all food service areas of Sainsbury's stores.

Married to Brian and mother to four (three children and one springer spaniel), Leona lives in N Ireland, and her hobbies include long walks with the dog, music and singing to anyone who will listen. 

Ian Critchley, Business Unit Manager, Avery Berkel

As Business Unit Manager at Avery Berkel, Ian leads the company by fostering a culture of innovation and customer-centricity, ensuring that the solutions provided continue to address the ever-evolving needs of the food retail market.

His dedication to comprehending these challenges stems from a deep-seated commitment to enhancing the shopping experience and reducing environmental impact.

Throughout his career, Ian has held various leadership positions within the food retail industry, where his passion for technology and customer-centric approach has consistently driven innovation.

Ian’s primary focus lies in understanding customers' and shoppers' pain points, particularly regarding loose fresh produce and the concept of bringing your own container.

Dr Christian Reynolds, Reader in Food Policy, Centre for Food Policy, City, University of London

As Reader in Food Policy, Christian leads various research projects and teaches on the Masters in Food Policy.

Christian is recognised as a global expert on food loss and waste and sustainable diets. He has worked on these issues in Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, the UK, US, and Europe. He is the lead editor of the Routledge Handbook of Food Waste (2019); he has also co-authored over 50 peer reviewed publications, as well as multiple reports and book chapters. Christian has given evidence to UK and NZ parliaments on FLW and contributed to the Food Loss and Waste Accounting and Reporting Standard.

He is currently the Principal Investigator of the NERC Sustainable Plastics Packaging project: "Reducing plastic packaging and food waste through product innovation simulation." This project expands and enhances the Household Simulation Model to focus on plastic food packaging to help manufactures provide the right type of packaging to reduce both food and plastic waste. the Household Simulation Model is currently used by WRAP and industry to reduce food waste in many food products.

From 2017 to 2020, Christian was employed WRAP as Technical Specialist in international food sustainability. In 2017-18 Christian worked on integrating healthy sustainable eating and food waste reduction messages on a wide variety of projects including the EU-LIFE funded TRiFOCAL project. From 2018-2020 Christian moved to the WRAP Global team, working on Food Waste and Sustainable Eating, working on the REFRESH project, and with multiple global partners including the World Bank, NRDC, and WWF. Dr Reynolds holds a PhD looking at quantifying the impacts of food loss and waste in Australia.

In his spare time he enjoys dancing around the house to folk music, and song. He is currently trying to cook as sustainably as possible for his family.

Helen Taylor, Marketing Sustainability Manager at Arla Foods Ltd

Arla is owned by a cooperative of dairy farmers that supply Arla products globally. Arla's aim is that every step taken, from farm to fridge, is focused on one ambition - to leave the farms, the food and the world around us in even better shape for the next generation. 

Helen's role at Arla Foods is responsible for leading the overarching marketing sustainability agenda for the UK portfolio. This role involves providing a clear understanding of what consumers’ wants and needs are in relation to sustainability, supporting the brand and categories teams in prioritising initiatives on their brands that will add value and that consumers care about the most, for example improving packaging, food waste prevention and reassuring on animal welfare. 

Helen's previous career has been centered around the food and consumer healthcare markets in senior marketing and commercial positions at Warburton’s, United Biscuits (now Pladis), Youngs Seafood and Merck Consumer Healthcare.

Elaine Fiore, Founder, Food Conservation Alliance & environmental educator for Broward County Public Schools

In three years, under Elaine’s direction, Food Waste Prevention Week evolved from a state-based initiative into a national campaign planned by a team of leaders within the food reduction movement from across the United States. The campaign is a multipronged effort to engage everyone to reduce food waste at home, work and in our communities.

In addition to spearheading this large-scale nationwide event, Elaine teaches sustainable food systems through a school food forest initiative and school food recovery programs. Ms. Fiore’s unique ability to bring together communities, government agencies, municipalities, non-profits, and the private sector to collaborate on a common mission have been key to the success of both initiatives. 

Elaine loves the outdoors, being physically active, gardening and playing golf, as well as being a mother to her two young adult children, Sophia and Michael. 

Andrew Jenkins, Waste Prevention Team Leader, Buckinghamshire Council

Andrew has worked in the Waste industry for over 17 years in a variety of operational & behaviour change roles and has sat on WRAP's National Communications Advisory Panel for nine years. In that time, he has introduced new collection schemes, boosted the performance of existing services and introduced new ideas and techniques to encourage positive changes in citizen behaviour.

His current role at Buckinghamshire Council is in household waste prevention. Avoidable food waste is key focus as one of the biggest waste streams and preventing it has benefits for the individual, local authority and our climate ambitions. 

Ben Thomas, Senior Environment Manager, John Lewis Partnership

Ben is responsible for ensuring the successful delivery of the John Lewis Partnerships environmental strategy which encompasses their work on nature and food waste in their supply base amongst other priority areas.

 

 

 

Bettina Gilbert, Head of Technical Support and Financial Mechanisms, WRAP

Bettina is responsible for working with businesses and the public sector to increase the amount of material that is re-used or recycled back into the world economy. In this role she designs and delivers technical support and investment mechanisms to overcome market failures, drive innovation, and create a sustainable, resource-efficient circular economy.

Since joining WRAP in 2010 Bettina has led business support and grant programmes in the UK and beyond, working with organisations in the textiles, resource management, food and drink, manufacturing, and public sectors. With a background in market research and knowledge management, Bettina has nearly 20 years’ experience in programme design and leadership. Bettina has an MBA from the University of Warwick.

Jamie Fleming, Communications Partner, Zero Waste Scotland

Jamie is responsible for the creation and delivery of impactful environmental campaigns which raise awareness, engage consumers, and empower them to adopt resource efficient behaviours, as part of Scotland’s transition to a circular economy.

Over the past decade, Jamie has honed his skills as a communications professional across the automotive, sport and environmental sectors, specializing in encouraging consumers to engage with niche activities/complex concepts they wouldn’t normally give time to.

Jamie currently enjoys his role as the “food guy”, In which he’s responsible for Zero Waste Scotland’s food waste reduction efforts. In this area they have explored creative and engaging campaigns to change attitudes and perceptions, with their work being recognised with several prestigious industry awards including:

• Purpose Awards EMEA Best Environmental Cause Campaign
• PR Week award for Best Public Sector Campaign
• The Marketing Society Simon Scott Award for Creativity and Craft
• CIPR PRide Awards for Best Public Sector Campaign

Jamie’s original area of study was medical ethics, but he retrained after having success doing influencer marketing for funding as an amateur international athlete at University. He has since obtained over 30 CPD certifications, is due to qualify in CIM’s new Sustainability Marketing programme in April 2024, and has recently joined the Media Trusts’ Communicating Climate Advisory Group.

Sian Morgan, Associate Specialist - Food System Transformation - Behaviour Change, WRAP

Sian joined WRAP in 2015, initially focused on local partnership engagement and citizen facing communication activity to deliver the national Love Food Hate Waste (LFHW) campaign. After a period of managing the delivery of the LFHW campaign, Sian’s role transitioned into managing behaviour change projects, applying behavioural science to explore a range of mechanisms for delivering food waste reduction at scale.

Sian has delivered and advised on a number of behaviour change projects, to influence action across the food value chain to drive a change in how we buy, use and consume food sustainably. Sian’s work involves the application of insights and data to identify and tackle key behavioural challenges to collaborate and influence change across manufacturing, retail, labelling and broader regulatory influences for household food waste reduction. Sian has also led and advised on behaviour change projects across plastics, recycling and the Hospitality and Food Service Sector.

Sian’s most recent work has been investigating the role of household food waste collection service and the opportunity to leverage behaviour change to achieve the goals of reducing household food waste and maximising capture and recycling of household food waste.