Speaker Bio:
Mark is Director of Food at FareShare and leads a team responsible for FareShare’s partnerships with companies in the UK food industry. FareShare is a unique charity fighting hunger and its underlying causes by redistributing surplus food to more than 2 000 local charities across the UK. By ensuring good food is not wasted, FareShare turns an environmental problem into a solution, helping to feed over 100 000 vulnerable people every day.
He led the development and publication of the innovative FareShare Food Efficiency Framework which was launched earlier this year and has represented FareShare at a number of cross-industry working groups.
Mark was previously Director of Sustainable Business at leading behaviour change agency Corporate Culture, and during 7 years of incredible growth he was Head of Commercial Relations (Food and Beverage) at The Fairtrade Foundation, leading Fairtrade’s engagement with manufacturers, brand owners and retailers in the UK food and beverage sector. Prior to that Mark spent the first 8 years of his career at Procter and Gamble.
Presentation Title:
FareShare: An opportunity for food businesses to reduce environmental impacts and generate significant social value
Presentation Synopsis:
Briefly, food waste is a big environmental issue that has a consistently growing profile. FareShare provides a unique proposition to make use of surplus food the food industry is not able to sell and would otherwise go to waste. We currently support over 3 000 charities across the country through 20 Regional Centres (depot) and have some fantastic social impact to demonstrate.
Critically, we also have a real hands on and consultative approach based around the FareShare Food Efficiency Framework to help food manufacturers, hauliers and retailers to identify how they can redistribute food they cannot sell, and in doing so reduce overall waste.
There are a number of key commercial partners who have provided case studies which will bring this to life (Tesco, Nestle, General Mills, etc. etc.)
We also have an ambitious target to grow x 10 times and try to emulate our European equivalents who all redistribute much, much more than we do in the UK. There is a strong policy platform for this (supported by the likes of The Grocer) to create a level playing field for the disposal of surplus food.
