GUEST: Barbara Bray MBE FIFST MSc

Barbara is a TEDx speaker and director of her own consultancy business Alo Solutions Ltd driving and delivering food safety in food supply chains and developing sustainable nutrition strategies for food businesses. She is co-founder of the multi-disciplinary platform Healthy and Sustainable Food. It brings together people from backgrounds in finance, pharma, health, agriculture, food industry and academia to share best practice in getting healthy and sustainable food to the whole population.  With a passion for educating people about food and nutrition, Barbara is a director of the Oxford Farming Conference, the leading international conference held in the UK for farming and agribusiness. She is a member of the food and nutrition group at the Institute of Food Science and Technology (IFST) and is a trustee of the Nutrition Society. She speaks at food and agriculture events and has represented the Private Sector Mechanism in speeches at the UN Committee for Food Security in Rome  Prior to consultancy Barbara worked in the Ugandan agri-business sector after graduation and then spent fourteen years in the chilled foods sector in the UK and France. Her roles covered food procurement, technical innovation and implementation of food safety systems. She is a Registered Nutritionist with the Association for Nutrition and an Fellow of IFST. In 2017, Barbara was awarded a Nuffield Farming Scholarship and travelled on Global Focus programme to Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Israel, UK and USA to study international food and farming systems. Her Nuffield Farming project on ‘Vegetable Production For Specific Nutritional Need’ looked at international food policies and private initiatives to promote consumption of vegetables which benefit our health.  Barbara was runner-up in 2019 and 2020 for the Freelance Nutritionist of the Year awarded by the Caroline Walker Trust. In 2019 she was awarded an MBE for services to food nutrition. Her latest venture is SCOUT for solutions – a collaborative problem solving workshop designed to help SMEs in the agri-food sector find new approaches to tackling their food and nutrition challenges.