The Royal Albert Hall is surely one of our most imposing and versatile venues. It sits on the site of a former stately home used to celebrate food and drink at the 1851 National Exhibition, which took place opposite in Hyde Park. Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert was the Exhibition’s sponsor and champion – and after his death in 1861 the Hall was built on the site as a memorial to him and his work.
So it is somehow fitting that it should have become the venue for The Grocer Gold Awards, held this week. Cathedral-like in scale and yet transformed into something warm and celebratory, it felt exactly the right place to recognise the best and brightest of our industry.
The statistics tell a great story: more than 60 judges assessing 33 awards; approaching 200 shortlisted entries of particular merit; more than a thousand people coming together to support and cheer on their colleagues. It is a huge and extremely impressive undertaking – and I’m quite well placed to say so. For seven years at the Food & Drink Federation I was responsible for a similar event in slightly overlapping, sometimes mildly competitive territory. Shorn of that responsibility, my evening with this year’s winners prompted some new thoughts on the importance of occasions like this.
Of course, it is right to acknowledge first that awards are commercially critical for the host organisation. Entries, dinner tables and sponsorship all bring much-needed revenue. For winners, success brings recognition of the quality of their work and can frequently be an important contributor to career advancement.
Those are all legitimate, if sometimes unspoken, reasons to have the awards in the first place. But watching the winners accept their awards, I was struck by another somewhat underused and certainly timely opportunity.
Educating the next government
We are just two weeks away a new prime minister and his new government. We don’t yet know who will fill the critical departmental roles for our industry. But it does seem highly likely that we will have yet another set of ministers who need to be brought up to speed on the sector and its concerns. For the most part, newcomes take food & drink retail and manufacturing entirely for granted. They have very little sense that together with farming and hospitality, it forms the paramount business sector in the UK economy. If the industry is to have any chance of prospering, we must use the remaining weeks of the summer to educate them.
Facing global geopolitical turmoil, significant pressure on the cost of living and supply chain uncertainty, this is the most challenging time for business. It’s also a period of considerable doubts about politicians’ ability to understand the scale of those challenges and work towards practical solutions. I suspect every one of us in that Hall was quietly very bothered about what is to come.
The wonderful achievements of those shortlisted and winning at The Grocer Gold Awards give us our lead. Our industry representatives – the BRC, the FDF, the NFU and UKHospitality, alongside The Grocer – should work urgently to put together a snapshot of the industry today: its achievements, challenges and what it needs from government. That analysis should be placed in front of every minister and PPS with any connection to grocery in the new government. Those who decline or prevaricate should be named, shamed, taken to task in their constituency surgeries and politely challenged on social media.
So long as the story we tell is positive – and we point out that we are the guardians of food security, a bedrock of national security – we will have our customers and shoppers with us. Making government understand this is not something I or my contemporaries ever quite achieved, but during Brexit and Covid we somehow mostly got away with it. We will not do so again. In pursuing that endeavour, we will be carrying on the work of all those entrants to The Grocer Gold Awards.
Ian Wright is a partner at Acuti Associates
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