Healthy and Sustainable Food – January Broadcast – “Leveraging Finance to Develop Viable Innovation to Support Healthy & Sustainable Produce In the UK”

Three key industry professionals have come together to create a unique Group called, Healthy and Sustainable Food. This is to constantly examine what would be the results if people from different sectors were to collaborate on solutions to produce healthy, sustainable food ongoing. The Founders are:

Barbara Bray MBE – Director – ALO Solutions

Mark Driscoll – Director – Tasting the Future

Jacqui Green – Director Viridis Associates

Their aim is to improve nutritional quality of food and availability for all socio-economic groups in the UK. They will do this by bringing individuals from different sectors together for projects on sustainable nutrition.

Beanstalk Global is proud to be hosting the third in the series of monthly Broadcasts for Healthy and Sustainable Food.

In our January Broadcast, we are majoring on how we can leverage finance to develop viable innovation to support healthy & sustainable produce in the UK. For this highly topical subject especially around the Brexit machinations, we want to discuss with Group’s founders and key industry experts how we can connect the innovators to the people with the problems and what the agenda needs to look like to make sure that finance flows to the innovation. And as part of that we want to discuss what “toolkits” are available to facilitate project delivery.

Included in the Broadcast as well as the three founders are our key experts:

Simon Pearson, Rob Ward and Peter Cowley

Simon Pearson is Professor of Agri-Food Technology and Founding Director of the Lincoln Institute of Agri Food Technology at the University of Lincoln. His research group focuses on the application of robotics and digital technologies across the farming sector. This research includes programs to develop robotic platforms to selectively harvest crops but also digital platforms to connect fresh produce supply chains. Prior to joining Lincoln, Simon spent 15 years in industry including as a technologist for Marks and Spencer plc.

Rob Ward was a farmer for the first 30 years of his life, on the family farm in Shropshire, which became one of the largest soft fruit suppliers to the UK supermarkets. While developing and running this business, he also patented the world’s first commercially available field-scale hydroponics strawberry growing system. The DNA of this AgTech innovation can today be found in 90% of commercial UK strawberry production. After successfully selling the farming and hydroponics businesses, he created built and sold three other food businesses. These range from FoodTech, Farm Shop retail and wholesale distribution; Food & Drink products. Recently appointed as the Agri-FoodTech DiT Dealmaker for the Global Entrepreneurs Programme, Rob is working with brands in this sector from across the entire planet and determined to demonstrate how the farming and food industry can contribute to positively to solving climate change challenges and also have a profitable future for the farming and food industry.

Peter Cowley is a Cambridge University technology graduate, and founded and ran over a dozen businesses in technology and property over the last 40 years.  He has built up a portfolio of 75 angel investments with nine good exits (including one that is 107X his investment and returned all the cash he has invested) and thirteen failures.  He is a board member of the Global Business Angel Network (GBAN), President Emeritus of the European Business Angel Network (EBAN), former chair of the Cambridge Business Angels and was UK Angel of the Year 2014.  He has mentored hundreds of entrepreneurs and is on the board of nine startups. 

Click picture below to watch the full record!