Better Hospitality Conference

A two day event in central London bringing together some of the brightest minds in the food industry for talks, interactive workshops, and networking opportunities.

27th-28th March at the stunning Mercato Mayfair

Covering four key themes
sustainability
resilience
people
nutrition

The line up

The Better Hospitality Conference will include hands-on sessions by more than 20 speakers from across the food and hospitality industries, as well as networking opportunities over drinks. Tea and coffee will be served 9-9:30am with drinks in the wine club from 4:30pm and an opportunity for you to explore the street food market for lunch 12:30-1:30pm both days. See session and speaker details below.

The venue

In 2019, Mercato Metropolitano (MM), the sustainable community food market and cultural hub opened in the magnificent Grade-I listed St Mark’s Church in Mayfair, on North Audley Street. That’s when Mercato Mayfair was born, spread over four floors of spectacular food stalls: each one of them offering fresh and artisanal food and drink, carefully prepared by small independent artisans and traders who care about where ingredients come from.

Food as a community builder is at the heart of MM’s ethos. Food as it should be, nutritious and sustainably sourced (as much as possible) – above all accessible to everyone.

MM’s purpose is to help shape a more sustainable food system by gradually bringing farmers and small producers closer to consumers – helping improve people’s nutritional health and reducing the wastage of our natural and environmental resources. Urban regeneration and respect for local history are also part of MM’s ethos – giving people a sense of belonging to a larger community.

To this day, MM remains a staple of the London food landscape with plans for global expansion.

Monday 27th March 2023

9:30-10:30am What should your ESG reporting look like and who is it for?

Professor Paolo Taticchi, Fabia Bromovsky, Domini Hogg, Claudia Candiotto, Bob Gordon

Environmental, Social Governance reporting is becoming a standard part of any business over a certain size. Investors, customers and employees are demanding it, it’s also essential for compliance with the Green Claims Code if you are making claims about reaching NetZero, but what should it look like and does that depend on who you’re producing it for? What’s the difference between reporting and disclosure? Is your reporting providing a complete picture of your impact on people, planet and profit, or are you missing key elements? Is it practical for producers and suppliers to provide the data you’re reporting on? What should your ESG reporting actually do for your business? How can it be used to inspire further improvements? Does the timing of it matter? These are all questions we’ll be addressing in this session with perspectives ranging from farm level data, through the supply chain to finished hospitality operator report and expert academic analysis.

10:30-11:30am Embedding circular thinking in your business to help reach net zero

Professor Paolo Taticchi, Lugano Kapembwa, Michele Tieghi, Neil Rankin, Dan Austin

Reuse is always better than recycle when it comes to carbon emissions. Generally reducing our overall consumption will accelerate your path to net zero and the great thing is, it will reduce your expenditure too. Circular thinking is about seeing the whole of what you do as a connected system and eliminating waste wherever you see it so that the end becomes the beginning and the system can feed itself as far as possible. In this session we’ll be exploring how several innovative businesses have used circular thinking to reduce their emissions. Solutions range from catering equipment reuse marketplaces to self-brewing bars. This is a session that is sure to open your mind to the untapped potential within your own business ecosystems.

11:30am-12:30pm Understanding the return on investment of responsible business decision making

Professor Paolo Taticchi, Andrea Rasca, Domini Hogg, Anouk Dijkman, Sarah Duncan

Sometimes return on investment is obvious. If you cut down on food waste you reduce your costs. However, demonstrating return on investment for responsible business decisions is not always so straightforward and it is often challenging to get everyone on board without doing this. Yet several businesses have already seen that making the right decisions for people and planet can often indirectly make a positive impact on their profit too. Investing in doing the right thing in one area of your business, like purchasing sustainable ingredients, can make it more cost-effective to recruit staff and reduce your customer acquisition cost. This session will explore a new data visualisation for company finances to highlight cost centre dependencies and how identifying these can give you a deeper and more holistic understanding of the health of your business and the contribution your ethical business decisions may be making. We will be asking how this data visualisation could be used to demonstrate existing return on investment, forecast future return on investment, and inspire other businesses to shift towards better hospitality practices.

1:30-2:30pm Strategies for creating an inclusive culture and equitable opportunities for your business

Lorraine Copes, Julio Bruno, Raj Jones

People perform better when they’re happy and to feel happy they have to feel accepted and appreciated for who they are. More diverse teams that benefit from an inclusive culture and equitable opportunities are often more creative, forward-thinking and resilient too. Yet very few businesses in hospitality are getting this right. Join us for this discussion to hear from leading inclusion advocates and practitioners on the strategies they have seen work best so far, covering mentorship, leader education, and learning & development programmes.

2:30-3:30pm It’s not a job, it’s a life. How do you keep work interesting?

Michael Tingsager, Karen Turton, Leanne Gunson, Kieron Bailey, Matt Grimshaw

Life is precious and we spend the vast majority of it working, so how can we make it as enjoyable as possible? As an industry hospitality is chronically short of staff and challenged by high staff turnover, yet a few pioneering businesses have managed to tackle these challenges by ensuring that the work their employees do is made as interesting as possible for them. People love to learn, but everyone has different interests. This session will explore ways in which businesses can help employees develop and learn in ways that best suit their goals, interests and aspirations.

3:30-4:30pm How to incorporate employee and customer happiness as a KPI for your business?

Andrea Rasca, Thomas Stroppel, Vikki Barnes, Michael Clitheroe, Fabrizio Orlando

Both employee and customer happiness are essential for a thriving business. This is especially true for hospitality businesses that rely on offering exceptional customer service day in day out, but how can you measure happiness? What kind of objective indicators are there for establishing the happiness levels of your employees and customers? How can you easily access this information without negatively impacting the happiness you are trying to measure? How can you best utilise and manage public customer reviews to ensure you are positively impacting your employee and customer happiness? In short, how can you turn your employee and customer happiness into a meaningful and effective KPI for your business?

Tuesday 28th March 2023

9:30-10:30am The impact of nutritional labelling on menus for businesses and customers

Julie Cleijne, Anjli Vyas, Luxey Dayanandan, Alyson Greenhalgh-Ball, Jenny Rosborough

Whether we like it or not, nutritional labelling on menus has become a central part of menu design. This session brings together nutritionists, chefs and marketeers to discuss how to communicate nutrition effectively on menus to help customers make healthy choices without negatively impacting on their in-premise experience and spend, how to calculate it accurately and in line with regulations, what the regulatory risks are of not getting this right, and the how it can even be used as a marketing tool for your business.

10:30-11:30am Tasting the terroir – how soil health, nutritional density and freshness all contribute to taste

Matthew Adams

An interactive session exploring the relationship between food quality and taste. Matthew Adams, Co-Founder of Growing Real Food For Nutrition CIC will be demonstrating how to Brix test vegetables and fruits to assess their nutrient density – an indicator of a healthy plant. This will be followed by inviting the audience to participate in a blind taste testing session to see if we can match the quality of a plant to its taste, using a set of metrics that relate to how well a plant has been grown in symbiosis with natural systems. Results will be revealed alongside the nutritional density of the samples at the end.

11:30am-12:30pm What should we be eating to transform people and planet?

Paul Newnham, Chantelle Nicholson, Josiah Meldrum, Jon Alexander, Alyson Greenhalgh-Ball

This session run by Paul Newnham from the Chefs’ Manifesto, will address some of the solutions needed to transform food systems for people and planet from a diverse range of food systems stakeholder perspectives. Key areas of discussion are regenerative farming and the kinds of crops that support this type of farming, indigenous, neglected and forgotten food species that should be part of diverse diets for people and planet, what this means for our nutrition and food choices, and the role that chefs and the wider food and beverage industry must play in food systems transformation.

1:30-2:30pm How to become a leaner, more financially strategic business and survive the cost of living crisis

Paul Pavli, Claire Scullion, Simon Maguire, Simon Elliott, Anthony Pender

Nearly all hospitality businesses will be feeling the squeeze this year, so how can you use this pressure to turn your business into a leaner, more financially strategic business for the future? To answer this question we are bringing together a panel of expert speakers who will be addressing the opportunities across business structure, employee training, menu engineering, smarter purchaising, cashflow management and credit lines.

2:30-3:30pm How to establish a local network of advocates and drive footfall to your business

Farida Messaadi, Perry Wakeman, Abiodun Adesoji, Gabriela Pearson, Katy Miller

Hospitality businesses rely heavily on local footfall, but not many of them have worked to understand what their local community really wants or how to turn their local community into a network of local advocates to drive footfall on your behalf. Several innovative businesses large and small have found ways to do this and will be sharing what has worked well for them. Strategies include offering space to the community for events, crowdfunding, strategic social media management, and working with local suppliers already embedded in the community.

3:30-4:30pm What each of your teams need to know but doesn’t about what everyone else is doing

Michael Tingsager, Anjli Vyas, Karen Turton, Chris Fletcher, Raf Baron

Communication is key to the success of any business, but it’s very easy for people to work in silos and understand only what they have to do to get their job done. However, if they are able to see better how what they are doing fits into the bigger picture of the wider business and what others are doing, they may realise that simple changes to the way they work, could make a big difference to the work that others are doing, saving everyone significant amounts of time and enabling everyone to feel more part of the same team. A better understanding of what others are doing also reduces frustration and friction within and between teams, making misunderstandings and disputes less likely. This session looks at how businesses can facilitate and encourage this kind of communication and knowledge sharing to ensure smooth business operations and a more pleasant working environment for everyone.

Encouraging donations for Only A Pavement Away

Tickets for the conference are free due to the generosity of all our wonderful speakers, but when you register for tickets we do encourage everyone to consider donating what you might have paid for tickets to our chosen charity, Only A Pavement Away, who work tirelessly to support people in hospitality struggling to make ends meet, and those already homeless find jobs in hospitality.

About the speakers (A-Z)

Abiodun Adesoji

Operations Manager – Rudie’s Jerk Shack

Abiodun is the Operations Manager at Rudie’s Jerk Shack helping to open their 7th London site in Tooting Broadway. Over the years, Abiodun has gained a wealth of experience working at several London flagship food markets, having previously held the position of Assistant General Manager at Mercato Metropolitano and now retaining his role as an Ambassador for the latter. Abiodun specialises in place making, sales and community engagement. Using his skills and extensive experience in the sector, Abiodun has transformed the face of a number of underperforming indoor and street food markets. He has created long-term strategies for and managed multiple sites, including Lower Marsh Market, Brixton Village, Shepherd’s Bush Market, Luton Indoor Market, and Gray’s Market.

Abiodun launched his career in the hospitality industry by transforming Luton Indoor Market. He successfully increased the market’s occupancy and footfall by 100% by engaging the local community, professional bodies, small food & beverage businesses, and even budding entrepreneurs at idea stage.

Andrea Rasca

Founder and CEO – Mercato Metropolitano

Andrea Rasca is the Founder and ‘Chief Executive Dreamer’ of the Mercato Metropolitano Movement. With a degree in Economics in Italy and Spain, a first Master in Management in Tokyo, and a second in International Relations fro  Fletcher School in Boston, Andrea is a passionate advocate of Right to Food. Over the past 25 years he has gained a broad experience within the food sector, focusing on the design and implementation of internationalization strategies for major Italian food companies (including the development of nine branches of Eataly in Japan). More recently, he has broadened his expertise by focusing on the development of a more holistic and coordinated approach to sustainable food systems that are community-led to enhance the positive impact on our environment, societies, and nutritional health. In 2014, he brought his experiences together and developed the inspiring new sustainable retail concept of Mercato Metropolitano, a movement which a UK journalist termed as “the standard-bearer for the renaissance of inner cities”.

Anjli Vyas

Chef & Strategy Director

Anjli Vyas is a UK based chef & strategy director working in the food sector specialising in product development, brand, sustainability and supply chain management. She works across hospitality, health, start-ups, FMCG, lifestyle and food policy. At her core, she is passionate about building innovative and sustainable solutions that support people, planet & purpose.

Anjli, is the founder of Bare Kitchen, a food for thought platform that explores human experience through the lens of food. The platform is home to the Empty Plates podcast and an immersive dining studio. She is also a brand & strategy director at Wren& Co, a food systems consultancy.

She has worked with a wide variety of global organisations across hospitality, catering and health such as Chaiiwala, Baxterstory, Condé Nast, Mars, WWF, Essence, Planet Nourish, Slow Food, Gi Centre & Centre For Food Policy.

Alyson Greenhalgh-Ball

Leader and Exec – Global Nutrition / Founder – Conscious Impact

Alyson is the founder of Conscious Impact and an
executive with over twenty-five years’ experience in the
public health sector spanning healthcare, academic,
non-ex, commercial and as a global nutrition lead within
the food industry at the Kellogg Company.

Passionate about how good food is a cornerstone for
health, her intent is to lean into the solutions across the
food system space so we can collectively continue to
nourish the world respecting our precious planetary
resources and celebrate food for the special place it has in
our society, celebrations and shared experiences.Alyson is a board member for numerous private and public sector organisations, a former Business Fellow at the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment University of Oxford, Vice-Chair of the British Nutrition Foundation and an active member of the United Nations SDG2
Advocacy Hub.

Anouk Dijkman

Sustainability Manager – Fooditude

Anouk is a London-based sustainability practitioner specialised in food systems, with experience ranging across the public, private and voluntary sector. She is currently responsible for Fooditude’s efforts to become a sustainability leader within the catering industry and complements her role with an MSc at the Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience. Whilst passionate about food and farming, Anouk has worked on a variety of key sustainability challenges including waste management, energy, procurement and carbon emissions.

Anthony Pender

Founder – Our Yummy Collection

Anthony is the founder and owner of Our Yummy Collection, a small independent business running two venues in London. He is also a former chairman of the British Institute of Innkeeping

Bob Gordon

Director – Zero Carbon Forum

Bob is Director of the Zero Carbon Forum, an industry collaboration supporting the hospitality sector to reach net zero, together at pace. He has worked in a range of sustainability positions for nearly 20 years, including roles in hospitality, retail, sustainable investment and agtech.

 

Claire Scullion

Menu Scientist

Claire Scullion heads up the Menu Scientist team and brings their range of skills together from research, design, creative, project management and collaboration.

“I began looking in greater detail at the art of menu science in 2012 while working with Whitbread’s restaurants. Realising it was possible to make a tangible difference to the profitability of a menu based purely on its design, began a love of behavioural science and striving to understand the way consumers navigate their restaurant journey. The menu plays a significant role in this journey and not only do the restaurants see the obvious benefits, but customers also receive a better overall experience when more time and thought is afforded to the menu. I work with a very talented team and together we get great results for our clients.”

Claudia Candiotto

Head of Responsible Business – Azzurri Group

Claudia is the Head of Responsible Business at the Azzurri Group, operator of well-loved food brands Zizzi, Ask Italian and Coco di Mama. With almost a decade of experience in CSR and ESG, Claudia has worked on national and international sustainability projects. Initially focusing on social impact and human rights, her remit has expanded to include overall ESG strategy setting, risk management and reporting.

Chantelle Nicholson

Chef and Owner – Apricity

Chantelle Nicholson is a multi-award winning chef owner of Apricity, London. Chantelle is an advocate for seasonality and sustainability, championing veg-forward cooking and being committed to creating a more sustainable future across her operation and activities, whilst also being an independent board member for ReLondon and a Food Council member for City Harvest.

Chris Fletcher

Board Member & Systems Director – Otolo

Chris has spent his career either working in hospitality or serving the people that work in and have loved every second of it. Leading teams across the UK and Europe, he has worked his way from KP to Board member. Obsessed with detail and passionate about people, working in hospitality has given Chris the skills to propel his career to where it is now. Technology is his other passion and he believes it will revolutionise the way we do business in the future, « it’s already begun » he says.

Dan Austin

Co-Founder – Lake District Farmers

Co-Founder and Managing Director of Lake District Farmers. Dan grew up on his Grandad’s Farm and his deep rooted respect for Agriculture is the driving force behind LDF’s mission – to create a sustainable future for hill farming in Cumbria.

Domini Hogg

Founder – Tried & Supplied

Domini Hogg is founder of Tried & Supplied, a purchasing platform making sustainable supply chains easy by facilitating sourcing, ordering, digital management of supply chain data covering sustainability, allergens and nutrition, as well as promotion through impact reporting. In developing Tried & Supplied Domini is drawing on her extensive experience of software development and data management as well as her expertise in sustainability and knowledge of both hospitality and farming to bring chefs and producers closer together.

Fabia Bromovsky

Director – Global Farm Metric project at the Sustainable Food Trust

Fabia Bromovsky is Director of the Global Farm Metric (GFM) at the Sustainable Food Trust. The GFM team work with an international coalition of farmers, scientists, expert practitioners, NGO’s, food businesses and finance companies working to establish consensus on a whole farm framework for measuring and monitoring  impacts at farm level. The Global Farm Metric is a basket of indicators against which to monitor the state of the system and measure environmental, economic and social outcomes.Previously she worked as CEO of the Rothschild Foundation and Waddesdon Manor, director of the Rothschild family office and board member of the Waddesdon Estate. Fabia is currently a board member and trustee for a number of family offices, non-executive Director of Whitley Asset Management, and Trustee of the Illuminated River Foundation

Fabrizio Orlando

Global Director, Industry Relations – Tripadvisor

Fabrizio joined Tripadvisor at the end of 2018 and since then leads the global Industry Relations & Affairs team, overseeing the company’s institutional relationships, and global thought leadership projects and partnerships. Fabrizio works with national hospitality and tourism bodies, associations and non-governmental organisations to build Tripadvisor’s role as a trusted partner for stakeholders in the travel and tourism industry. Fabrizio has a Philosophy degree from Federico II and a Master in Philosophy and Politics obtained at La Sorbonne University, and before joining Tripadvisor worked as a strategic consultant for Euromonitor International, a global consulting and market research firm.

Farida Messaadi

Head of Marketing & Communications – Mercato Metropolitano

Growing up in a Berber family, Farida quickly learnt an important lesson in life from her mother: “no matter where we’re from, food is something we all have in common. The sharing of food connects us across cultures and generations. Food tells our story and provides insights into our cultural heritage”.With a career spanning 20 years at Hyatt Hotels and Resorts, holding key and strategic roles in Sales & Marketing as well as promoting corporate events worldwide, Farida then set up her own successful consultancy to help businesses significantly grow their food and beverage revenue.Sharing the same core values as the MM movement, she joined Mercato Metropolitano in 2020 to bring her expertise and realise her childhood core beliefs: good and nutritious food needs to be accessible to everyone to build strong and resilient communities.

Gabriela Pearson

Co-founder & Chief Impact Officer – FoxyWings

Gabriela is the co-founder and Chief Impact Officer at FoxyWings. She ran a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2021 that captured the hearts of many of her town, and enabled Foxy Wings to grow from a home kitchen to a 100-seater restaurant and bar. Since breaking into the hospitality industry, she has been prioritising putting purpose and community building at the heart of her business. She currently runs communications for the Cranfield University Sustainable Business group and is part of the development team for ExploringSustainable Futures, an interactive learning game that was showcased at COP26, and uses systems-thinking approach to unlock the change-maker in us all. She is passionate about seeing entrepreneurs empowered to build and run profitable businesses that positively impact their local community by valuing their people and reducing harm to the planet.

Jenny Rosborough

Head of Nutrition – Jamie Oliver Group

Jenny is Head of Nutrition at the Jamie Oliver Group and is particularly passionate about improving the food environment through policy change. She is on The Global Food Security Programme’s Strategy Advisory Board, Bite Back 2030’s Impact Advisory Board and works across a number of consultancy projects with health organisations including The Food Foundation and Impact on Urban Health. Jenny was previously Campaign Manager at Action on Sugar and has an MSc in Nutrition from Kings College London.

Jon Alexander

Author of Citizens / Co-Founder – New Citizen Project

Jon is author of Citizens: Why the Key to Fixing Everything is All of Us, and co-founder of the New Citizenship Project, a book and company that work to shift the dominant story of the individual in society from Consumer to Citizen. Among other plaudits, Citizens was recently listed by McKinsey as one of its Top 5 Recommended Books in its Summer Reading Guide 2022, described as “an underground hit” in the Financial Times, and selected by the World Economic Forum for its CEO Book Club. Jon began his career with a decade in
the advertising industry, winning the prestigious Big Creative Idea of the Year, before making a dramatic change. Driven by a deep need to understand the impact on society of 3,000 commercial messages a day, he gathered three Masters degrees, exploring Consumerism and its alternatives from every angle. In 2014, he co-founded the New Citizenship Project to bring the resulting ideas into contact with reality. In Citizens, he is ready to share them with the world.

Josiah Meldrum

Co-Founder – Hodmedod

Josiah Meldrum is a co-founder of Hodmedod, a business working to increase diversity on farms and in the food we eat, for the benefit of farming and farmed landscapes, the environment, individual health and our food culture. Hodmedod was born in 2012 from the realisation that fava beans were grown but little eaten in the UK, though a delicious and nutritious food that can help build healthy soils and benefit farming systems. Bringing the beans back into British kitchens proved the catalyst to build a network of farmers diversifying arable rotations by introducing existing, forgotten and novel pulses, grains and seeds, including carlin peas, naked barley, quinoa, chia and camelina. A proud winner of Best Food Producer in the BBC Food and Farming Awards, Hodmedod now works with over thirty different crops and a similar number of farmers to produce a diverse range of over 100 plant-based wholefoods.

Julie Cleijne

CEO – Sustainable Kitchen Consultants

Julie Cleijne is a Nutrition trained chef, founder of Sustainable Kitchen Consultants. Julie and team provide recipe development, training and advisory services in sustainable, healthy, plant-based and free-from cooking, and work with their clients to create innovative recipes and new products, with health and sustainability at the fore.

Julio Bruno

Global CEO/Board Director/Investor/Author

International media, travel and hospitality executive, investor, and author of the book Passion to Lead, Julio is always seeking a path and a platform to have a positive impact on this world. Former CEO of TimeOut, Julio has now joined Mercato Metropolitano as both Chairman and Investor, and is also Board Director for the Pacha Group of restaurants, clubs and hotels. He has a keen interest in the start-up community and acts as an angel investor and board advisor to a handful of businesses globally, including Floe, Audicus, Roasting Plant, Central St. Martins/Birkbeck and Spanish Theatre Company. He also founded his own company br1 creative ltd to advise international companies on digital transformation, business strategy and  global expansion. As an advocate for Diversity & Inclusion he has been named in the 2021 HERoes Advocate Executive list celebrating the top 35 global leaders who are championing and advocating for women in the workplace; Top 50 EMpower Advocate Executive 2021 list of global leaders championing and advocating for ethnic minorities; and Top 100 OUTstanding LGBT+ Role Model global list 2021.

Karen Turton

Founder – Purple Story

Karen Turton is an operator at heart and brings three decades of commercial and leadership experience to Purple Story. In her former life, Karen was a Regional Director for Nandos & the Ops and People Director for Turtle Bay before answering her calling and launching Purple Story.

Katy Miller

Head of Marketing – Punch Pubs

Katy is an astute and engaging Marketing leader with a creative eye for new market opportunities and passion for an immacualte guest journey. She is experienced at winning share through local marketing by cultivating relationships and reputation.

Kieron Bailey

Co-Founder & Director – Otolo

Kieron has been described as a hospitality evangelist after 3 decades in the industry across operations and people development. He is a passionate exponent of this beautiful obsession of ours that is hospitality. He has become a serial entrepreneur, empowered with the skills and traits that his experience in hospitality developed. He is co-founder of EXP101, an events and content creation business built to connect people through sharing stories. He is co-founder of Otolo, the hospitality mentoring community that will enable you to retain your people through their development, Otolo was built to Support, Inspire, and empower your people. He believes that at the core of exceptional hospitality, you will find engaged, happy teams, and to achieve that, we need to put our egos aside and what we believe we already know to be true, opening our minds to what comes next. The future of hospitality will be delivered by a well trained and motivated array of individuals with their own objectives that can be focused on the overarching goal by inspired leadership. We live in a world now where we get to be chapters in the books of our peoples lives, where we work just as hard on developing them with the same passion as if they were to be with us for ever. Invest in your people, ensure they are better equipped than when they came to you and you will get to be more than just one chapter of their book.

Leanne Gunson

Learning & Development Manager – Pizza Pilgrims

Leanne spent over 18 years as a proud hospitality worker, from bartender to General Manager, to Learning & Development Manager, working in some amazing restaurants with some incredible leaders. In her 10 years at Jamie’s Italian she discovered her passion was in training and development, and now with Pizza Pilgrims she is Learning and Development manager where she gets to help the teams with their journeys to being ‘everyday better’. 

The challenge of connecting and engaging people with different types of learning is what keeps her connected and engaged! The reward is seeing people progress from those learnings and put them to practice in everyday life.

Lorraine Copes

Founder – Be Inclusive Hospitality

Lorraine is a multi-award-winning social entrepreneur, hospitality consultant and life coach. Having spent two decades as an executive director for brands including Gordon Ramsay Restaurants and Corbin & King, Lorraine felt compelled to form Be Inclusive Hospitality CIC in 2020, due to the consistent lack of representation of people of colour in positions of influence, and the supply chain. This social enterprise now holds the prime position of igniting the much-needed conversations, and delivering initiatives to advance change within hospitality, food, and drink sectors. Her work has been featured in the Evening Standard, Metro, The Guardian, TheCaterer and Big HospitalityLorraine is a judge for Guild of Fine Foods Great Taste Awards, Bold Woman AwardsUK, by Veuve Clicquot, Uber Eats Restaurant Awards and Purple Umbrella Awards.In 2022 Lorraine was named the GQ Food & Drink Innovator of the year winner, she received a special award in the Code Hospitality 100 Most Influential Women in Hospitality list and won Entrepreneur of the Year at the Precious Awards. In 2023 Lorraine was named NatWest and Pioneers Post WISE100: Top women in social enterprise. Be Inclusive Hospitality was recognised by NatWest’s SE100 last year, as one of the UK’s most impressive social enterprises.

Lugano Kapembwa

Co-Founder – Loopcycle

Lugano is a senior professional who is passionate about sustainability and business transition towards circular businesses models. Following a successful career spanning commercial real estate, media & publishing and airport management he started a new chapter, leaving corporate life to start Loopcycle, a groundbreaking digital platform connecting manufacturers and operators to trace, manage and recover commercial equipment across its lifecycle. Through his work with Loopcycle, Lugano envisions a truly circular world in which every product is traced and trusted.

Luxey Dayanandan

Head of Wellness & Nutrition – Restaurant Associates

Luxey Dayanandan is the Head of Wellness & Nutrition for Restaurant Associates and is a Registered Nutritionist, having graduated from Kings College London with a BSc (Hons) in Nutrition, she has over 10 years’ experience in the food industry with a focus on developing healthy recipes, food labelling and delivering nutrition education. She oversees the wellness programme and works with the culinary teams to ensure the menus offered are nutritionally balanced.

Matt Grimshaw

Co-Founder – Youda

Matt’s the Founder of Youda – a people experience platform for hospitality companies that want to make their culture a source of competitive advantage.
Matt’s fascinated by all things behavioural science, technology, data, organisational culture and how the world of work is evolving. He’s a long way from being an expert on any of that stuff… but he’s living proof that if you keep working on a problem for a long enough even well intentioned amateurs can make progress!

Matthew Adams

Co-Founder & Director – Growing Real Food for Nutrition CIC

Matthew Adams is co-founder and director of Growing Real Food for Nutrition CIC (grffn.org.uk). A small start-up exploring how to measure and grow nutrient dense food, to encourage symbiosis and increase the natural health of people and planet.

Michael Clitheroe

General Manager – Balmer Lawn Hotel

Michael Tingsager

Founder – Hospitality Mavericks

Michael is the Founder and CEO of Hospitality Mavericks, a company that helps Maverick Founders/CEO’s to unleash their team potential so they can build a business that makes profit and impact. Michael has been living and breathing the hospitality and restaurant industry from the day he was born, and he started working in his mum and dad’s small restaurant group in rural Denmark from an early age. He spent six years building a 20+ unit cafe chain in Denmark; +11 years working for McDonald’s Denmark and UK, and more than 8 years as a consultant working with brands across Europe. Once a week Michael hosts The Hospitality Maverick Podcast, which all about inspiring leaders that build businesses from the inside out – businesses that makes positive impact on their people, their community and the planet.

Michele Tieghi

Co-Founder and Director – German Kraft Brewing

Michele is German Kraft Brewery CEO, a sustainable 0-mile production brewery in London, where they serve they beer on site fresh, free from additives and conservatives.

Neil Rankin

Creative Director – Simplicity Foods

Neil is an award winning chef, entrepreneur and restauranteur, with Michelin training and a science degree. He was previously known for his butchery and BBQ cooking, having opened several meat-led restaurants including Temper. In 2019 he began experimenting with fermented vegetables and set out to prove that plant based ‘meats’ could be made without a load of processed powders and still taste incredible. Neil believes in using ingredients that he can grow and cook himself, which led to the start of symplicity foods.

Prof. Paolo Taticchi

Professor in Strategy and Sustainability & School Deputy Director – UCL School of Management.

Highly active in executive education, Paolo has trained thousands of managers and executives of Fortune Global 500 companies. His research on corporate sustainability and performance measurement is internationally recognized and Paolo’s last book is titled “Corporate Sustainability in Practice” and was published in January 2021.
Outside of the academy, Paolo has significant consultancy experience in the fields of strategy, education, and sustainability. He has worked in this capacity for firms of various sizes, and in a range of different industries. Today, he advices (or serves in the advisory board) influential organisations and is one of the scientific advisors of the Ministry for the Ecological Transition in Italy.

Paul Newnham

Exec Director – SDG Advocacy Hub & Coodinator – Chefs Manifesto

Paul is a strategic innovator and executive leader with twenty five years of expertise managing complex stakeholder relationships, designing campaign strategies, and extensive knowledge of the not-for-profit sector. He possesses strong business acumen, exceptional advocacy skills, and the ability to build deeply engaging relationships to influence decision makers, improve practices, drive change, and deliver impactful solutions to complex problems alongside communities around the world. Paul Newnham founded the SDG2 Advocacy Hub in 2015, a secretariat convened to connect NGOs, advocacy groups, civil society, private sector, and United Nations agencies around Sustainable Development Goal 2: Zero Hunger. The Hub’s goal is to coordinate global campaigning and advocacy to achieve food systems transformation.

Paul Pavli

Exec Director / NED / Strategic Consultant

An experienced hospitality & leisure executive, specializing in future strategy, operational efficiency and business transformation. Paul’s career spans over 35 years with FTSE businesses such as Whitbread, JD Wetherspoon and Punch Taverns. He is an Exec / C-suite leader with expertise in growth, turnaround, business sale, exit in Private Equity and Plc’s. His most recent exec role was at Punch taverns where he served as Managing Director for 4 of his 14 years with the business. He currently serves on the boards of Black Rock Restaurant Group, Our Yummy Collection, GigRealm, as well as being a trustee for the Only A pavement Away Charity. His passion is working with businesses to help them understand their purpose, set strategic goals, and engage their people all in order to deliver award winning customer service.

Perry Wakeman

Director – Rennet & Rind

Perry is a Certified MonS Affineur, working and studying under Hervé Mons, Meilleur Ouvrier de France (Best Artisan Craftsman of France), in the 9 MonS maturing cellars located in the Auvergne Rhône-Alpes region. Perry currently holds the highest certification possible with the Academy of Cheese and is a regular contributor to the Academy’s curriculum.

Perry is ‘Head of Cheese’ at Rennet & Rind, responsible for maintaining the strong relationships we have with our British cheesemakers, regularly visiting them on the family farm to batch select our cheese. Perry also looks after our Rennet & Rind maturing room, using his expert knowledge to ensure every cheese that leaves us arrives to you at its very best.

Raf Baron

Feedback Coach & Podcast Host

Raf Baron is a former professional athlete turned feedback mindset coach and podcast host. His career in sports and hospitality allowed him to develop the skills needed to pursue his passion: helping people become the best version of themselves. His expertise is all things feedback and a confident and resilient mindset. From a fry chef to a Head Chef and General Manager. From Hard Rock Cafe, TGI Fridays to Wagamama. Hospitality offered him a great career and opportunities to better himself and develop coaching programs based on that experience.

Raj Jones

Head of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion – Sodexo

Having worked in dedicated DE&I roles for over 10 years Raj is a skilled practitioner with a proven track record in successfully applying core concepts, current and best practices, strategies and tools to develop and implement solutions that will drive diversity, equity and inclusion outcomes across complex matrix organisations.

Sarah Duncan

Sustainability and ESG Consultant & Trainer – Spleeping Lion

Sarah Duncan is an Sustainability/ESG consultant and author of The Ethical Business Book and The Sustainable Business Book (out March 23rd 2023). Her company is a certified BCorp. She has been in business for over 30 years – starting with luxury hotels, then moving through private club and spa development in Asia, to setting up her own consultancy, Sleeping Lion, in 2005. Through training, consultancy and guest speaking, Sarah now helps businesses understand the commercial and moral benefits of sustainable and ethical business practice (or ESG). She advises on how to make sustainability a genuine part of your business culture and day-to-day practice, not just a tick-box exercise (or race to be the ‘least bad’). She is on a mission to try and simplify this highly complex area and help companies make sustainability work for them, in a long-term, authentic and holistic way.

Simon Elliott

Founder – Profit Hound

From being the only boy in home economics class at 13 to becoming a chef at 15, hospitality was all Simon ever wanted and its treated him incredibly well. After 25 years in consultancy he launched Profit Hound in 2020 to support his hospitality colleagues “Unleash Their Food Potential” with a dash of purchasing, a good glug of menu and product engineering and a sprinkle of management controls.

Simon Maguire

Director – West Peak Partners

Simon’s background in fast paced luxury hospitality businesses has given him a wide and varied experience in leadership. Simon’s fascination with leadership techniques and styles gave him the opportunity to play an integral role in growing some of todays leading Boutique Hospitality Brands.

With a strong focus on personal leadership and the impact this can have on the people around you Simon enjoys challenging people and businesses to explore their true potential.

Outside of work Simon can be found honing his triathlon skills in preparation for his next Ironman event and raising funds for charities close to his heart.

Thomas Stroppel

Head of Learning and Development – Dishoom

Dr Vikki Barnes

Clinical Psychologist / Founder – Positive Well Being

Vikki is a Doctor of clinical psychology,happiness & wellbeing consultant, positive psychologist, international speaker, author, humanitarian, adventurer and believer in change for good. Vikki qualified in 2011 with a Doctorate in Clinical and Community Psychology. With over 10 years of NHS service, she has provided mental health interventions and education to patients and staff in a variety of services. Bridging the gap between operational and corporate worlds, she designed and led a national wellbeing programme with Virgin, working alongside leaders and executives, embedding effective practices into company strategy and ethos, with sustained, outstanding results.  In 2019, Vikki founded Positive Wellbeing, a business that focuses on proactive and preventative strategies for forward thinking organisations, enabling them to create long lasting, successful cultures by putting the health of people first. Her client list includes universities, schools, healthcare, the armed forces, the royal navy, aviation, maritime security, law firms, management companies, property agents. A member of the Wellbeing Economy, Vikki promotes positive leadership and a movement towards a better world, by blending the wellbeing of people with wellbeing of the planet. Her new book Free Happiness: the art and science of positivity is used within organisations to improve people experience and culture.