The Small Print

On Monday, campaigners delivered a Citizens’ Charter to the door of 10 Downing Street in which people from across the UK demanded urgent action to make healthier food more affordable and accessible. It came just days after the Health and Social Care Select Committee of MPs said they had “no faith” that the government will achieve its aim to “launch a moonshot to end the obesity epidemic”. Organised by the Recipe for Change alliance of NGOs, signatories to the charter want to see the government build on the success of the soft drinks industry levy by using fiscal and other regulatory measures to improve the food environment. With the Labour government well over two years into its term in office and recently under new leadership, Nick speaks with Kate Howard from Recipe for Change – who works as Children’s Food Campaign coordinator for Sustain – to discuss what actions citizens want to see from ministers and businesses where healthier food is concerned, and assess where we stand with government policies designed to improve the UK’s dietary health.

As COP17 reaches its conclusion in Armenia, progress towards meeting a global commitment to halt and reverse nature's decline by 2030 remains off track. To help speed up action, the Nature Positive Initiative has launched a new set of common, global metrics designed to make measuring changes in nature simpler and more consistent for businesses. It boils down more than 600 existing metrics into just four key indicators of nature’s health, which companies can use to better understand their nature-related dependencies, impacts, risks and opportunities. In this week’s episode, Nick speaks with the initiative’s convener, Marco Lambertini, to explore how nature underpins our social and economic wellbeing, and how food production in particular is entirely dependent on healthy natural systems providing key services like pollination, soil fertility and water storage capability. Marco joins us direct from the conference floor to explain how the new metrics were developed, how they are intended to be used by companies, how they integrate with existing nature standards from the likes of TNFD and SBTi, and why understanding and acting on nature dependencies is fundamental to the future resilience of business models.

Employees from ethnic minority backgrounds are still being denied the same opportunities to build successful careers in hospitality as their white counterparts. That’s one of the key messages behind a new campaign from Be Inclusive Hospitality which seeks to help employers build fairer, more inclusive workplaces that will ultimately drive stronger business performance. The ‘Better Hospitality’ campaign calls on employers to publicly commit to six priorities that will support fair access to opportunity among employees of all identities. It follows a survey which found 57% of respondents believe high employee turnover is a direct result of unfairness and exclusion, with 38% believing these biases directly contribute to people leaving the hospitality industry altogether. In this week’s episode, Nick speaks with Be Inclusive Hospitality’s founder Lorraine Copes to explore what needs to change to build a fairer, more inclusive hospitality industry, and the practical steps businesses must take to deliver and sustain that change.

Boards are neither asking the right questions to understand the risk the food industry is facing from shocks to the system, nor allocating the time, energy or budget to materially reduce that risk. This was just one of a series of damning statements made by a group of anonymous industry insiders who returned this month with a fresh warning that current supply chains will not be resilient in the face of the climate crisis and other structural vulnerabilities. In this week’s episode, Nick speaks with Ana Cuddeford from the NGO Inside Track, which coordinated the memo, to explore why the group has once again felt the need to sound the alarm to investors and what they hope to achieve. With a new group of insiders specific to the hospitality and foodservice sector about to launch, Ana explains how concerned professionals can lend their own voice to the movement and why their warnings should not be seen as an attempt to bring their businesses down but rather to ensure those businesses, and the food system they are a part of, are equipped to deal with the challenges of the future.

Emily Coon is part of a new generation of sustainability professionals working to build long-term resilience into the bones of businesses. Soon to leave her role at St Austell Brewery to join the pub group, Fuller's, Emily joins Nick to discuss the changing nature of sustainability roles and responsibilities within the food and hospitality sectors, and the qualities this generation of leaders will need to bring to the table that sets them apart from those who came before. Emily shares the reasons why she sees it as a positive trend for the sustainability function to become more closely integrated into areas like finance, operations and procurement – but highlights the risk that accountability is lost in the process. She explains too why it’s essential the modern sustainability professional is commercially literate, and spells out why the ability to influence should be considered a sustainability ‘superpower’ in the absence of the authority to make business-critical decisions.