Karen Betts speech: FDF Industry Dinner 2026

Karen Betts, CEO FDF, Speech at FDF Dinner at Guildhall, 25 March 2026

Good evening. Welcome everyone.

Everyone’s beautifully dressed.  The Guildhall looks lovely.  And you probably all know that this is where mediaeval Londoners used to come to pay their taxes, so you probably don’t want to draw too much attention to yourself.

After dinner, you’ll be hearing from Gavin Derby. Gavin is well known to FDF members, not least as a former President of ours.  So we’re delighted you could join us, Gavin.  Gavin’s the Vice Chair of the Felix Project and FareShare, which you will all know, having been close partners for many years, merged last year to form a single, and the largest, food redistribution charity, combining FareShare’s national network with Felix’s innovation and London expertise.  I was a trustee of FareShare and I’m now a trustee of the new, merged organisation.  So I know that the merger was a big thing.  And a good thing. For both organisations and for the many hundreds of charities and community groups that the combined organisation supports.

I know how committed food and drink manufacturers are in their support for FareShare and Felix, which is why we asked Gavin to come and say a few words this evening.  Everyone in this room knows how the surplus food that’s donated benefits individuals, communities and the environment. The industry is foursquare behind both charities and their coming together.  Gavin, we’re looking forward to hearing from you.

Now to what I wanted to say.

And this is straightforward.

The food industry matters.  And within that, food and drink manufacturing matters.

At the end of last week, FDF released our 2026 Regional Report – entitled Powering Communities.  If you were in any doubt about the impact of food and drink manufacturing up and down the UK, please take a look at this.  

In short, what the report tells us is that food and drink manufacturing is at the heart of communities everywhere, and at the heart of our diverse, complex food system.  Everyone here knows that food and drink manufacturing is the UK’s largest manufacturing sector – we say this often enough!  But the report really brings that to life.  In Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, food and drink manufacturing is the dominant manufacturing industry, as it is across most of England.  Only in the east of England, the North East and the West Midlands are we overtaken by pharmaceuticals and car manufacturing.  And, as the report illustrates in a series of case studies, in every region we’re employing tens of thousands of people in good, well paid and skilled jobs, in large companies and small, from the factory floor to food scientists, food technologists, data specialists, packaging experts and so on.  Making everything from fish fingers to tinned vegetables, fruit squash, rice pudding, chocolate, crackers, breakfast cereals, cheese and more.

The report tells you something of what it means to be British, it says something about our culture and about ourselves – are you a Carrs water biscuits person? Or more Nairn’s oatcakes?  Do you like a crumble topping on your mince pie, or traditional pastry?  Our report also illustrates what it takes to keep a nation fed.  Factories, including some of those pictured, are running now, as I speak.  Our colleagues at those sites are ensuring that they’re consistently producing the affordable and safe food and drink, and the wide range of choice, that we as consumers expect.

As the FDF team put the report together last week, it was great to hear the Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, speaking of her commitment to sustained, productivity-driven regional growth.  Of her plans to build resilient prosperity in partnership with business.  And to address the uneven distribution of opportunity in the UK.

To that I would say, food and drink is your willing partner.  We want productivity driven growth too, and by definition, for us, it’s regional. Every company here should and can be part of the government’s drive for investment.  We want to work with government to ensure food and drink manufacturers, our supply chain and our customers are – as the Chancellor said – giving workers the best tools to do their jobs, discovering and applying new ideas.  And if we achieve that across food and drink, across big companies and small, the impact will be visible and regional, in higher skilled, better paid jobs.  This in turn will be meaningful for mayors and council leaders, who are set to receive a share of national taxes, where they can drive growth.

I would add to that too that investment in our sector is about giving consumers more and better choices – products that are both tastier and healthier, delivered to them in recyclable packaging and energy efficient ways, with sustainable ingredients. To do this, we work hand in hand with farmers.  We’re a huge investor in agriculture, through long-term contracts that provide certainty and security, that support sustainable and productive farming practices, and that provide higher value routes to market for farming produce.   Investment in our sector is about innovation too – in nutrition, new ingredients and new inputs, in our companies and through our supply chain.

But that partnership with government, the partnership we need to really deliver regional growth in food and drink, feels threadbare.  For example, despite ongoing concerns about food price inflation, a situation clearly now made worse by war in the Middle East, food and drink manufacturing isn’t receiving support on energy costs.  This has been promised to automotive, aerospace, to wind turbines and some others.  But not to food and drink. This is because food and drink isn’t considered by government to be Advanced Manufacturing – although I struggle to understand how government thinks we feed 70 million people without being Advanced Manufacturers.  Even small companies don’t make things by hand.  The partnership isn’t working well when car manufacturing is put ahead of food manufacturing, and in a crisis.  We shouldn’t need to remind anyone that food and drink is an everyday essential.  Nor that, on average, people buy a car only every 6 to 9 years.

This makes me wonder whether our industry is hidden in plain sight, depended upon but undervalued all at the same time.  I come back to the war in the Middle East.  This energy shock is coming on top of a turbulent six years in our industry. Since 2020,

• we’ve operated seamlessly through COVID lockdowns;
• changed our supply chains and business models to come out of the EU, only to reverse that process now to go back in;
• we’ve run systems change through packaging and recycling EPR and DRS, the right thing to do but costly;
• we’ve invested to adapt to new high fat, sugar and salt regulations, which the government now wants to change before they’ve even been evaluated;
• we’ve weathered the energy and ingredient supply shocks of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine;
• all while serving increasingly cash-strapped consumers.

A new energy shock is, to put it mildly, unwelcome.  Energy is embedded in every aspect of food production.  There are going to be unavoidable inflationary impacts.

So I expect that, rightly, food security is going to rise up the agenda again.  Will this, then, be the prompt that government needs to revisit its partnership with industry? To renovate and reset something that’s threadbare and shouldn’t be.  And, if not now, then when?

Nothing and no one is perfect.  But we are lucky to have the food industry we have.  I’ll end where I started.  Food and drink matters.  Even small steps towards a better partnership between government and industry would go a long way.