Name: Dawn Durrant

Was: Company secretary for Geest (now Bakkavör)

Now: Company secretary for Dunelm Group

Years in grocery: 11

Career background: Durrant qualified as a solicitor at Allen & Overy before she started working with ready meals manufacturer Geest in 1994 as legal adviser. She was then promoted to head of legal. Durrant gathered extensive experience at Geest, including corporate governance, legal and regulatory compliance, mergers & acquisitions, and commercial law. Geest was taken over in 2005 by Bakkavör in a cash deal worth £485m - Bakkavör’s largest-ever aquisition.

What happened next? Durrant says: “Between leaving Geest/Bakkavör in 2005 and joining Dunelm on a permanent basis in 2011, I ran a company secretarial consultancy and was also company secretary of Spicers, the European office products wholesaler.”

Biggest achievement in grocery: Durrant is very proud of her time at Geest. “As the investor community and our food retailer customers started to ask us about how we managed sustainability issues, such as the environment, ethical trading, health & safety and employee welfare, I developed the Geest corporate social responsibility policy (jointly with the head of communications, Paula Cooper) in the early 2000s,” she says. “Geest also won the very first PricewaterhouseCoopers award for ‘Building Public Trust’ for the sustainability and governance reporting in our 2003 annual report and accounts.”

What does the future hold? “I am company secretary of Dunelm Group, the FTSE 250 specialist homewares retailer. Dunelm is a fast-growing company with a great culture and an interesting development strategy, so there is plenty to keep me busy for the foreseeable future.”