Webinar Series

Claire Kneller is Head of Food for WRAP Global and a recognised expert in food loss and waste around the world. She leads WRAP’s work on sustainable food systems outside the UK, working with governments, businesses and international organisations. She helps develop national policy, encourages the measurement of food loss and waste, and the implementation of activities to prevent it.

David is the Head of International Resource Management within WRAP Global, the international arm of UK Sustainability Charity, WRAP. In his ten years with the organisation, David has led projects in over 20 countries. His particular areas of focus are on helping countries use voluntary agreements and citizen behaviour change campaigns, underpinned by solid evidence and evaluation, to tackle food, textile and electrical waste and plastic pollution.

Dr Simone Piras is an agricultural and rural economist at the James Hutton Institute, UK. Until October 2018, he was a post-doc researcher in the team of the University of Bologna working on the EU projects Horizon 2020 REFRESH e FP7 FUSIONS (“Food Use for Social Innovation by Optimising Waste Prevention Strategies”). In the framework of REFRESH, Simone contributed to the creation of simulation models to study consumer and retailer food waste and the adoption of innovations against it, and was a driving force behind the study on unfair trading practices and voluntary agreements carried out within the policy work package. He has a Master in development studies and a PhD in agricultural and food economics and statistics. Besides food economics and policy, his research interests include the socio-economic implications of smallholder farming in transition countries.

Nora’s expertise lies in the field of sustainable consumption, lifestyles and communication. She has valuable experience in working with multiple stakeholders. Nora co-manages the German REFRESH activities on food waste and works with producers and retailers in the food sector. She moderates and facilitates stakeholder meetings, and supervises the organization of international events and workshops.

Dr Raquel Diaz-Ruiz holds a PhD in Sustainability (2018) by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. Raquel’s research focuses on understanding food waste behaviors along the food supply chain applying a multilevel approach. She is involved in different food waste projects at the national and European level. Her main research interest is the sustainability of the food systems. To understand food system dynamics, she conducts diverse methodologies quantitative and qualitative such as consumer surveys, interviews and focus groups as well as food supply chain stakeholder participatory techniques.

Dr Nina Sweet works as a specialist adviser for the WRAP Cymru. Nina is the technical lead for WRAP Cymru’s current work in valourising unavoidable waste from the food industry and is leading the programme to innovate and deliver technology to the food sector She has a broad experience of organic waste treatment and nutrient management and has had a career spent providing technical support to policy makers across resource efficiency and bioeconomy development. Previously Nina has led the work on the development of a quality protocols, and has worked at a European level to provide technical input to the development of European end of waste criteria for biowaste. Nina worked for the Environment Agency for 12 years and is an experienced water and waste regulator.

Dr Karen Luyckx works with Feedback who are best known for putting the structural causes of food waste at the top of business and policy agendas. As their head of research, Karen coordinates the work on the potential use of heat-treated meat-containing surplus food for omnivorous non-ruminant livestock in REFRESH. Karen holds a PhD in Geography and International Development from the University of Leeds and has over fifteen years of experience linking the environmental movement with science. She has led various collaborations between NGOs, British and European Universities.

Dr Karin Östergren is senior researcher at RISE Agrifood and Bioscience and holds a position as Adjunct Professor at Department of Food Technology, Engineering and Nutrition, Lund University. Research interests include sustainable and resource efficient industrial food production and food supply chain management including exploring the benefits of combining food process engineering and environmental system analysis.

Dr Julian Parfitt is Technical Director at Anthesis UK and is an expert in the field of food loss and waste (F-L&W) and food supply chain resource efficiency. In recent years he has been a key player in the development of UK and international research into F-L&W and in the area of food waste policy. He has carried out a number of key strategic roles, including as a member of the United Nations Environment Expert Group on SDG Indicator 12.3.1, team leader on UK Government’s Foresight Review ‘Future of Food and Farming’ (2011) and working with the House of Lords as Specialist Adviser on their review of European food waste prevention policy (2014). Dr Parfitt is currently providing policy analysis for the EU Horizons 2020 Refresh project on food waste in the supply chain and has successfully delivered a pan-European project for DG Santé looking at the relationship between food date labelling/ consumer advice and food waste (2017). Between 2016 and 2018, Julian was a member of the project advisory committee for WWF’s ‘No Food Left Behind’ project, a multi-partner research project based in the United States designed to measure and report on F-L&W at primary production for four specialty crops.

Drs. Ing. Joost Snels has been working at Wageningen Food & Biobased Research since 2000. He is the expert leader for the Supply Chain Development expertise field and project manager with experience in the field of (re) designing quality-driven (international) fresh food chains. For more than 18 years he has been involved in several projects that focus on resource efficiency, and in particular on reducing food waste. He created a methodology to measure food waste in healthcare with the aim of gaining insight, creating awareness and initiating improvement measures. Within REFRESH he and his colleagues developed a prototype food waste monitoring tool to help retailers gaining insight in their performance leading to possible actions towards food loss reduction.

Tecla leads the UK analytics team at Anthesis. She has 6 years’ experience supporting clients with sustainability issues. Tecla has led the GHG inventory calculations for several global clients, including implementation of software solutions. Tecla leads Anthesis’s food waste work with Tesco across all countries. She has been project managing the work with Tesco UK since 2014, from improving the methodology year-on-year, supporting the analysis, carrying out quality assurance on the work and supporting the verification process with KPMG. Tecla also supports Tesco in regular reporting to the UK leadership team on its progress against its food waste targets. Tecla holds the following qualifications: MChem (Hons) in Chemistry from Oxford University and MSc in Environmental Engineering from Imperial College London.

Jenny Carr is a Citizen Campaign Project Manager at WRAP and works on citizen food waste prevention. She works on the Love Food Hate Waste campaign (www.lovefoodhatewaste.com) which educates and inspires people like you and me to take positive actions to reduce our own food waste. Jenny takes a lead on engaging with business sector partners in particular to take action on citizen food waste. She is also currently working on a range of behaviour change intervention pilots, looking to create proven interventions that will then be scaled up across the UK in order to reduce household food waste. Before WRAP Jenny worked for ten years in the public sector as part of Oxford City Council’s Environmental Sustainability Team.

Dr Erica van Herpen is Associate Professor in the Marketing and Consumer Behavior Group of Wageningen University. Her research focuses on how consumers evaluate, use, and choose from (food) product assortments. Her research interests include influences of the general store context (store layout, social influence), on-shelf presentation of products (shelf organization, product packaging, nutrition labelling), and consumers’ use of food products at home and resulting food waste. In her research, she uses novel research tools such as virtual reality. In the EU project REFRESH, Erica is co-work package leader of the workpackage on consumer understanding of food waste.

Stephanie Wunder works at the Ecologic Institute – an independent not-for-profit think tank, dedicated to improving environmental policy.
Stephanie coordinate’s the institute’s work on food systems and sustainable land use. Within REFRESH, Stephanie coordinates the overall project communication and dissemination work and has lead the development of policy recommendations to reduce consumer food waste.

Tom Quested is a researcher whose work focuses on food waste and has authored a number of influential reports and papers. He advises governments, companies and organisations worldwide on the causes of food loss and waste, research methods, quantification methods and practical solutions to minimise this waste. These include the United Nations’ Environment Programme and Food and Agriculture Organisation, The European Commission, national and regional governments, and major UK supermarkets.