Food Cardiff Expands Strategy Board to Drive 2030 Sustainable Food Movement Cardiff 2026

Key Points

• Food Cardiff has appointed eight new members to its Strategy Board to strengthen city-wide sustainable food initiatives.
• The appointments follow Cardiff earning the prestigious Gold Sustainable Food Places Award in 2024.
• The expanded board is tasked with developing an ambitious new action plan to guide the city’s Good Food Movement through to 2030.
• The new members represent diverse sectors, including healthcare, technology, hospitality, agriculture, further education, environmental policy, and community food provision.
• The board met in person for the first time in July to evaluate priorities, evidence, and outcome measurement frameworks for the upcoming three-year action plan.

Cardiff (Cardiff Daily) August 18, 2026 – Food Cardiff has formally expanded its Strategy Board with the appointment of eight new members, bringing a broad range of professional expertise and lived experience to the city-wide partnership as work begins on a new multi-year food action plan. The strategic expansion comes as the organisation looks beyond Cardiff’s achievement of the Gold Sustainable Food Places Award in 2024, aiming to establish an ambitious roadmap to guide the capital’s Good Food Movement through to 2030.

The newly appointed board members represent a wide spectrum of sectors across the food supply chain, environmental management, and public health. The eight new representatives joining the board are:

• Anthony Ruston, Head of Retail & Catering at Cardiff and Vale College
• Sabrina Khan, Founder of Maasi’s Restaurant
• Jono Hughes, Vegetable Farmer at Blas Gwent Farm
• Gareth Ludkin, Policy and Projects Manager at the Campaign for National Parks and Environmental Consultant
• Pola Grzybowska, Medical Doctor
• Andrew Rowlands, Software Engineer with previous food-sector experience
• Sarah Germain (CEO) and Katie Padfield (Head of Development) of FareShare Cymru, sharing a joint board position.

These individuals bring varied perspectives from further education, farming, community food provision, environmental policy, healthcare, hospitality, technology, and international food systems. They join existing board members representing Cardiff Council, Cardiff and Vale University Health Board, Food Sense Wales, Cardiff Farmers Markets, academia, community food projects, and independent communications.

The established members continuing their tenure on the board include Liz Lambert, Sustainable Development Group Leader at Cardiff Council; Sam Chettleburgh, Principal Sustainability Officer – Food at Cardiff Council; Emma Holmes, Head of Nutrition and Dietetic Services at Cardiff and Vale University Health Board; Rebecca Stewart, Principal Public Health Practitioner with the Cardiff and Vale Public Health Team; Jane Cook, Strategic Communications Consultant;

Carol Adams, Cardiff Farmers Markets Manager; Camilla Lovelace, Community Food Activist representing Tremorfa Pantry and Splodown; and Angelina Sanderson Bellamy, Professor of Food Systems at the University of the West of England.

The expanded board convened in person for the first time in July to begin examining the strategic priorities, empirical evidence, and cross-sector partnerships required to underpin the upcoming action plan.

What Are the Immediate Priorities for Food Cardiff’s New Action Plan?

As outlined during the initial Strategy Board meeting, the immediate priority for the partnership is to synthesize extensive data gathered from projects across the city, identify systemic coverage gaps, and establish clear impact metrics.

According to statements made by Lucinda Sehic, Food Cardiff Co-ordinator, the capital benefits from an active foundation, but requires a structured approach for its next operational phase. Sehic noted that Cardiff already possesses a strong and active Good Food Movement, five established goals, and a wealth of learning from local projects and conversations.

She explained that the core task is now to bring that information together, understand where gaps and blind spots remain, and determine where Food Cardiff and its partners can achieve the greatest impact over the next three years.

Sehic further emphasized the critical importance of establishing robust methodologies for evaluating long-term progress. She highlighted that certain aspects of food-system transformation present measurement challenges, noting that the Strategy Board will assist in identifying a meaningful combination of indicators, outcome measures, and insights derived from lived experience to verify whether local conditions are genuinely improving.

Reflecting on the new additions to the leadership team, Sehic added that the new members have already contributed fresh energy and valuable questioning to the process, expressing optimism regarding what the partnership can accomplish moving forward.

How Will the Partnership Build on Cardiff’s Gold Sustainable Food Status?

The new three-year action plan will build upon the framework established during Cardiff’s progression through the national Sustainable Food Places accreditation scheme.

In 2024, Cardiff became the first location in Wales to progress through Bronze, Silver, and Gold Sustainable Food Places status, whilst becoming only the fourth location in the entire United Kingdom to achieve the Gold standard at that time. The award recognized coordinated effort across the city to build a healthier, fairer, and more sustainable food system.

Food Cardiff’s overarching Strategy continues to be guided by five core Good Food Goals:

• Creating a healthy Cardiff
• Creating an environmentally sustainable Cardiff
• Building a thriving local food economy
• Establishing a fair and connected food system
• Fostering an empowering food movement

The upcoming action plan aims to maintain these foundational principles while directly addressing feedback gathered from citizens, community groups, and commercial stakeholders. Over the past year, a series of Food Conversations conducted throughout Cardiff collected residents’ direct experiences and proposals regarding the future of local food policy.

This qualitative insight will be evaluated alongside quantitative evidence concerning food insecurity, health inequalities, food waste metrics, access to agricultural and growing spaces, public-sector procurement strategies, local food sector employment, and the operational resilience of Cardiff’s community food organizations.

Commenting on the strategic direction, Pearl Costello, Chair of the Food Cardiff Strategy Board, stated that the newly assembled board brings together an exciting and varied mix of knowledge, skills, and experience. Costello emphasized that such structural diversity is essential when addressing the complex intersections connecting food, public health, poverty, agriculture, environmental management, local communities, and the broader economy.

She noted that the objective is to ensure the next action plan remains ambitious yet practical, inclusive, and rooted in the reality of residents’ daily lives, adding that the new members will help challenge existing thinking, identify operational gaps, and construct the partnerships necessary to translate strategic ambition into tangible outcomes.

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What is the Background of Food Cardiff and the Good Food Movement?

Food Cardiff was established as a city-wide partnership mechanism designed to connect individuals, businesses, public bodies, and community projects working to foster healthy, environmentally sustainable, and ethically sourced food. The organization serves as part of Wales’s expanding network of Local Food Partnerships and stands as a founding member of the national UK-wide Sustainable Food Places movement.

Over the past decade, local food partnerships across the UK have increasingly transitioned from localized charity initiatives toward integrated food system planning. This approach links public health initiatives—such as reducing diet-related ill health and tackling food poverty—with local economic development, urban agriculture, and environmental management.

Cardiff’s achievement of the Gold Sustainable Food Places Award in 2024 marked a key milestone in this transition, acknowledging extensive multi-agency collaboration between local government, health boards, educational institutions, and independent sector producers. The current expansion of the board represents the organizational shift from achieving recognition to executing long-term strategy up to 2030.

What are the Predictions for How This Development Will Affect Cardiff’s Residents, Local Economy, and Public Services?

The expansion of the Food Cardiff Strategy Board and the formulation of the 2030 action plan are expected to directly impact several key demographic groups across the city over the next three to five years:

• Local Residents and Consumers: Citizens are likely to see expanded access to sustainably sourced, healthy food options, alongside increased support for community growing schemes and food-poverty mitigation projects. The integration of lived-experience insights into public policy aims to ensure that food distribution interventions effectively target areas with high health inequalities and food insecurity.
• The Local Food Economy and Independent Businesses: Independent hospitality businesses, local farmers, and community producers stand to benefit from structured policy support aimed at reinforcing local supply chains. With representation from local farming, college catering, and independent restaurants on the board, the new action plan is expected to advocate for local procurement models that assist small-scale producers and food businesses in securing institutional contracts.
• Public Health and Educational Institutions: The close alignment between Cardiff Council, the Health Board, and higher/further education institutions indicates that public-sector catering—including hospital and college meal provision—will increasingly align with environmental and nutritional sustainability targets. In the long term, systematic improvements in public food procurement and nutrition education are designed to ease preventable diet-related pressures on local healthcare services.