Julie Owst has been leading Bidfood UK’s sustainability programme for six years, making sure that the foodservice wholesaler’s approach is aligned to the needs of customers and wider consumers, whilst addressing key environmental and social issues in food sustainability, within a highly cost-competitive sector. She transitioned into this field from a non-traditional path and recently completed an MSc in sustainability leadership at Cranfield University to build more specialist skills.
Julie’s Path into Sustainability
I transitioned into a full-time sustainability role in 2019 after 11 years in logistics and four in HR, focusing on communications and change management. Many paths lead to this field, but my logistics background provided strong commercial grounding in a fast-moving, low-margin sector, while HR helped me influence people with different priorities and consider sustainability through an organizational culture and leadership lens.
To build credibility and specialist knowledge, I completed an MSc in Sustainability at Cranfield University, which sharpened my strategic, data-led approach. Sustainability leads must work cross-functionally, engage diverse stakeholders and adapt their leadership style. With little hierarchical power, success relies on persuasion, enthusiasm, authenticity—and above all, persistence!
Governance and Ethical Considerations
Strong governance underpins everything and is often underrated. It’s not ‘sexy,’ but it ensures clear accountabilities and proactively manages risk. Our sustainability governance includes board-level sponsorship for each programme pillar (people, communities, customers, planet and principles), giving the board access to resources and hierarchical power to ensure things get done.
We report quarterly on each workstream, creating transparency and visibility for internal and external reporting. Many stakeholders hold us accountable—employees, customers, NGOs, industry groups and the global Bidcorp reporting team. This structure helps identify gaps and adjust priorities. Each pillar has a core working group, with participation widening every six months to allow stakeholders to critique and refine our approach. It’s not perfect, but it works for us.
Challenges in Sustainability
The ‘elusive green consumer’ that often gets mentioned in the media, is a real challenge. In other words, the consumers who would say that sustainability is really important to them in their purchasing, but this often doesn’t translate through into reality when there’s a cost differential for similar products with very different supply chains or credentials. There’s no easy answer for tackling this; we do our best to educate our customers on the issues (for example via our factsheets and we create blogs and podcasts to talk about what we’re doing to drive change – as well as administering plate2planet – a LinkedIn group that shares resources and tools for raising sustainability standards in foodservice. I also try to change the language I use; I recently suggested that we drop the word ‘sustainability’ in favour of talking about what we need for a better future.
Sustainability leads must work cross-functionally, engage diverse stakeholders, and adapt their leadership style— with success relying on persuasion, enthusiasm, authenticity, and above all, persistence
‘Anonymous food’ – and by this I mean that in the hospitality and foodservice sector, the food our customers present to the consumer doesn’t benefit from visible labels (in the same way that the retail sector can use logos or labelling to differentiate provenance or responsible sourcing) – so it’s really challenging for our customers to evidence responsible purchasing. It’s not obvious for example, whether eggs are from free range or caged hens, or whether beef comes from UK grass-fed farms or from intensive/soya-fed systems further afield, so many decisions are purely based on price. That said, the sustainability agenda is boosted by many of our larger national account customers who have corporate commitments or procurement policies that drive up standards, so our larger national customers help in this way.
A very broad customer base – developing the point above, we serve a diverse customer base with very differing levels of commitment to sustainability, so developing responsible sourcing policies is rather like trying to find one size that fits all – a policy needs to address the relevant sourcing issue (e.g. deforestation, overfishing, animal welfare issues etc.) but to do so in a way that is commercially and practically feasible for our suppliers. So, one way in which we do this is by working with NGOs (for example, Efeca for soya) to understand the supply chain and what level of ambition is feasible, liaising with suppliers to outline our ambition and understand their ability to match it and then creating our policy and giving suppliers a timeframe in which to fully align.
Key Approaches and Learnings
One of our key approaches was to simplify the message. Prior to our rebrand, we were trying to be all things to all people (which relates to the point above about our broad customer base) but our Positive Force for Change rebrand involved clarifying our most materially relevant impacts (which for example, are plastics, emissions and waste, for the ‘Planet’ pillar) and creating SMART targets in each area. This simpler approach is easier to remember and articulate, it focuses resource and effort and drives consistency in our approach.
The second game-changing aspect worth highlighting is the sponsorship at board level. This meant that the relevant expertise for driving each objective could be identified and/or developed, so ownership of ESG objectives is spread across all functions – HR, supply chain, commercial, property and facilities, finance and so on.
This isn’t too much of an issue for Bidfood UK, as our customer base is limited to the UK, but as our customer base grows, we’re starting to have to be more aware of EU legislation, for example EUDR (EU Deforestation Regulation). In short, we absolutely have to make sure we maintain our own knowledge in evolving areas – which means setting time aside for industry working groups, conferences, research and our own personal development and training. Our customers rely on us for advice and guidance, so a commitment to continual learning is a non-negotiable element of the role.
As mentioned, we widen out working group participation to a broader forum every six months, so that wider stakeholders can raise issues that they feel we need to address. In addition to this, our in-house Insights team produce a quarterly PESTLE report that guides future strategy; this is a really valued input into our strategy development. In addition to this, the MSc that I mentioned earlier included learning approaches for strategic foresight and horizon planning, so structured techniques for monitoring emerging trends are hugely valuable.
In technology terms, we've begun a three-year contract with CarbonCloud, a SaaS tool that provides product carbon-footprint data for our entire range while engaging suppliers to improve data quality. This enables us to measure and reduce the carbon impact of the food we sell.
Tech in food and agriculture has huge potential, with tools emerging to monitor deforestation, soil quality, carbon sequestration, land use change and more—driven by demand for better food provenance data.
