Issue 135 face to face

F2F

FACE TO FACE Ursula meets:

BARBARA BRAY Fruit and vegetable expert Nutritionist, Nuffield Scholar Food Safety Consultant

Ursula Arens Writer; Nutrition & Dietetics Ursula has a degree in dietetics, and currently works as a freelance nutrition writer. She has been a columnist on nutrition for more than 30 years.

If you would like to suggest a F2F date (someone who is a ‘mover and shaker’ in UK nutrition) for Ursula, please contact: info@ network healthgroup. co.uk 40

Ursula meets amazing people who influence nutrition policies and practices in the UK.

They say that opposites attract and Barbara has always bedazzled me. She is so positive and bright and breezy; the first person you would choose to be on your team (sports; quiz; work; travel).

We met late morning, but already the café in Welwyn Garden City was completely full of glamorous women.

This was the ladies-who-lunch crowd something we both aspire to, of course.

She always loved food. Her mother inspired her with kitchen-fun and her dad led the food adventures remit: let’s make yoghurt, let’s watch apple oxidation, let’s measure pH levels of foods etc. So, after A levels in Biology, Chemistry and Statistics, Barbara went to the University of Reading to study Food Technology. “I had two really great placements in my practical year. The science lab at Waitrose head office was an eye-opener on food quality testing and I also got out and about to visit stores and suppliers. Then I had half a year in Munich in Germany with the Kraft development laboratory.

At the time, fat reduction was the company mission, so the entire focus was on the development of salad dressings and sauces with less fat,” she said.

But Barbara had an inkling that some aspects of food technology were a bit ‘every day the same’. So she decided to take a left turn in the food supply chain and study Agriculture at Silsoe College (part of Cranfield University.) Her MSc was on postharvest technologies specialising in tropical crops; little did she realize that cold chain logistics and gas flushing techniques would become

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the explosive areas of growth that we now enjoy the daily benefits of.

After graduation in 1996, doing good works in a land of permanent sunshine, Uganda, seemed attractive.

Barbara was sponsored by the Silsoe college charity SAFAD and then the UK Kulika Charitable Trust, to advise on postharvest management of durable crops for subsistence farmers. Barbara also became an expert on the issues of growing vegetables for export, especially beans. “There was some local confusion on why beans had to be so uniform in size and shape, but this was the buying specification. Fortunately, nothing went to waste because other shaped beans went to the local markets,” said Barbara.

Back in the UK, Barbara joined the Accelerated Management Scheme of fresh produce supplier Bakkavor.

Perhaps you have not heard of this company, but they are the major supplier of prepared fruit and vegetables to all UK supermarkets. Barbara covered every aspect of the supply chain, from walking muddy fields with shy farmers, to meeting less-shy supermarket buyers.

“Bagged salads were being introduced in early 2000 and there was great excitement about different flavours and colours of leaves. So adieu to iceberg footballs,” said Barbara. But she had to laugh at some surprise product successes. “No research could have predicted how popular prepared mashed potato has become. It was the project that everyone would have questioned. Also frustrating was the commercial success of battered

potato slices, when the sharpest marketing stars at Bakkavor were in such a battle to make salads sexy,” said Barbara.

In 2001, she had a bad car accident, which required a few months off work; even now, some of her aches require further medical attention. On her return, she was made responsible for tomato procurement (annual turnover of £40 million, so a lot of tomatoes). Barbara enjoyed lots of international travel to tomato-growing regions and also enjoyed extending the looseround tomato market into the more diverse and flavoursome varieties we enjoy today.

For more than 10 years, Barbara zigzagged her way up the technical and management levels within Bakkavor. She came to understand in great depth all the issues affecting the growing, processing and distribution of fresh foods, both in the UK and abroad. But she also observed the consumer. “It is so frustrating that all sorts of messages and claims promote packaged foods, but that there is so little communication about the great health benefits of fresh fruits and vegetables. It is also frustrating that so many products are formulated back to front: starting with desired labelling (with nothing ‘red’ on traffic lights of course) and working back to a recipe. It should be about healthy ingredients and great taste,” said Barbara.

Having been involved in the M&S highselenium tomato project, Barbara developed an interest in the nutrient manipulation of vegetables. In 2014, she decided to get back to being a student, and did an MSc degree in Human Nutrition at the University of Chester.

Her project was on the nutritional knowledge of those enrolled in slimming clubs: she found that understanding the energy content of foods was good, but there was some confusion over the nutrient balance in diets.

Barbara has now set up her own technical and nutrition consultancy (www.alo-solutions. com). Fresh produce businesses wanting advice on audits, or retailer specifications, or any other aspect of food safety and quality, know that Barbara will deliver straight-talking robust critique followed by pragmatic problem solving.

And of course she will always try to insert some nutrition-sense into the project.

Last year, she successfully became a Nuffield Scholar. This is a travel fund worth about £12,000 given to the 20 applicants who, ‘have the ability to lead positive change in farming and horticulture, as well as inspiring passion and potential in others.’ Barbara very much fits this description. Her Nuffield project is on vegetable production for specific nutritional needs, which she will present in autumn 2018.

As a Nuffield Scholar, she has been invited to observe agriculture and food production in Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Israel and the USA. She also travelled to China, South Korea, Tasmania and New Zealand to consider vegetable marketing and the use of health claims. We chat about 5-A-Day, but she is full of descriptions of smarter, ‘cuter’ food messaging in other countries. Nutrition communication in the UK seemed dry to Barbara and divorced from food producers (starting at the top with the split between DEFRA and PHE, in contrast to the pulling in the same direction together in the US, under USDA).

I first met Barbara when she joined the selfemployed nutritionists group SENSE (www. sense-nutrition.org.uk). She is now the meetings’ organiser; the shepherd to us flock of freelancers.

Because of her many years in fruit and vegetable production and marketing, she must be unique in her deep understanding of ‘field to fork’, and I am sure that her skills and insights will be much needed to support UK food producers in the upcoming challenging BREXIT years. It is wonderful to find someone so nutrition focused, planted so deeply into decisions at the start of the food chain.

And now I think about Barbara every time I go shopping (for bagged salads, tomatoes, beans, kiwi fruits, bananas, courgettes, sweetcorn…). www.NHDmag.com June 2018 - Issue 135

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