The Suffolk Food Summit 2026 brings together the people, organisations and communities who shape our local food system. Hosted by Mid Suffolk District Council at The Food Museum, the summit is a full‑day opportunity to celebrate local food, explore the challenges facing Suffolk’s food resilience, and collaborate on practical, place‑based solutions.
Food resilience means different things depending on where you sit in the system. For some, it’s about coping with extreme weather, droughts, floods or heatwaves. For others, it’s about disease outbreaks affecting crops or livestock, supply chain disruptions, rising food prices, or the viability of farming and food businesses. Whatever the perspective, these issues are deeply connected — and strengthening resilience benefits everyone.
The summit is designed specifically for those interested in building a resilient food network in Suffolk, including:
A complimentary lunch featuring local Suffolk produce will be provided, along with refreshments throughout the day. Please advise us of any access or dietary requirements when booking your place.
Welcome and introductions:
Councillor Andrew Mellen, Leader of Mid Suffolk District Council
Key Note Speaker:
William Kendall, Trustee of the Grosvenor Estate and Suffolk based farmer
Panel Discussion:
Facilitated by Jenny Cousins, Director at the Food Museum
Workshops Session 1:
Our Farming Future - Rethinking our use of land, the view from a farm that has adopted a different way of farming
How do farmers need to change from traditional methods to a more sustainable way of managing the land for food and wildlife? If farming today was designed from scratch, knowing what we know about climate, nature and food security, what would it look like?
From Farm to Family Table - Creating Five Dinners with Local Produce
How do local food producers connect their products to practical meal solutions and customer engagement? Understanding the links between healthy eating and local food. How do we link farm-to-fork narratives with recipes?
Growing Communities Through Food
How can growing food become part of everyday life in Suffolk communities? What growing initiatives already exist? How do we increase participation? What support is needed? What role can growing play in food security?
The Future Food Plate - Rethinking What We Grow
What does the future of farming look like when viewed through the food on our plates? Explore how Suffolk's growers can help build a more diverse and sustainable local food system by expanding the range of crops they produce. Moving beyond a reliance on monocultures, discuss opportunities for greater fruit, vegetable and speciality crop production that responds to changing consumer demand, environmental challenges and local economic needs.
Workshops Session 2:
A repeat of the morning workshops and an opportunity to attend a different workshop
Panel Q and A:
Closing Remarks:
Councillor Andrew Mellen, Leader of Mid Suffolk District Council
Before being elected as a councillor, Andrew’s career was in farming, including several years as a farm manager in Sussex, as well as six years working in agricultural development in Nigeria and Malawi. Alongside his duties as council leader he grows food on a 3-acre smallholding.
Wiliam Kendall is a Suffolk organic farmer, entrepreneur and environmentalist. He led the development and subsequent sale of both The New Covent Garden Soup Company and Green & Black’s and is now a director of drinks business Cawston Press. He is also advisor to, or a director of a number of entrepreneurial or family-owned businesses and is a Trustee of The Grosvenor Estate. Within Grosvenor he is a director of Grosvenor Food & AgTech.
William had brief careers in the army, as a barrister and then in finance before becoming an entrepreneur. Now he mainly advises larger private businesses on their strategy. He farms organically at Maple Farm in Kelsale with his wife Miranda. He is President of The Suffolk Wildlife Trust, a Trustee of The Suffolk Community Foundation and is a Deputy Lieutenant of Suffolk.
William works and campaigns on a wide range of issues connected with food and the countryside. He is particularly concerned with nature conservation and the role of enterprise and business in helping solve challenges we face in the county.
Claire is a film, impact and content producer. She is the producer of independent environmental documentaries ‘Six Inches of Soil’ and ‘From the Ground Up’, both exploring our current farming system, and the ‘Six Inches of Soil’ monthly podcast.
She has a background in TV production, charity fundraising and event organising. As an environmental campaigner she set up eco community groups both in London and Cambridgeshire - with food and farming at the heart of her campaigning.
With a passion for holistic health care she has been a trained therapist for 15 years, specialising working with those affected by cancer and a trustee at Cambridge Cancer Help Centre. She is also part of the comms & marketing team at the cancer centre.
Claire is never happier than when she has her hands in the soil. When she can she works at Sweetpea Market Garden (farm featured in Six Inches of Soil) In 2025 she set up ‘Regen Cam’, an ever growing group of soil / agroecology loving folk in Cambridgeshire.
Emily Aitchison is a Suffolk-based food and farming entrepreneur, owner of Kenton Hall Estate and co-founder of ACRE Farm & Bakery. Her work connects the field, the bakery and the kitchen, helping people understand where their food comes from and the farming that makes it possible.
Through the estate’s cookery school and ACRE’s approach to growing, milling and baking with heritage grains, Emily brings food education to life. She champions seasonal produce, soil health and biodiversity, alongside the pleasure of cooking and sharing good food.
A 2021 Nuffield Farming Scholar and Soil Association Ambassador, Emily also founded the Upper Deben Farm Cluster, bringing neighbouring farms together to support nature across the landscape.
Mariah Ballam is Facilitator for the Upper Deben Farm Cluster and the Upper Alde and Ore Farm Cluster, representing over 70 members farming across more than 15,000 hectares. In this role, she maintains an overview of how these farm businesses operate and what members need to advance both environmental outcomes and farm business sustainability. This vantage point allows Mariah to identify opportunities for individual farms as well as collaborative projects across the clusters.
With a background in education and grassroots conservation, Mariah brings a strong understanding of how to engage diverse stakeholders around shared goals. Much of her work centres on understanding each farm's objectives and securing funding to turn those ambitions into practical, on-the-ground results — such as the clusters' landscape-scale, multi-catchment river restoration project, which has identified 50 sites so far across three freshwater catchments. To date, the project has secured £730k in funding, delivered 2 natural flood management sites, and gained funding for the construction of 3 further sites and the design of 18 more in the coming year.
Tom McVeigh is Farm Manager at Kenton Hall Estate in Suffolk, a Nuffield Scholar, CLA committee member and NFU Ambassador. He combines practical farming experience with a keen interest in diversification and adding value to crops grown on British farms.
Looking to the future, Tom’s focus is on developing opportunities in hazelnut processing, exploring how British-grown hazelnuts can be processed and brought to market. His ambition is to strengthen the connection between growers and food producers, creating new opportunities for UK agriculture.
Greg is a market garden/wannabe farmer based in Cavendish. After a misspent youth he headed to sea, working on yachts of all shapes and sizes across the world. After decades on the run, and many very important perspective shifts he came home, to England, to begin the long road into farming.
After 4 years of learning the ropes, one failed attempt, he has settled at Ark Farm, the goal now, create a farming system where nature isn’t a thing and world events are not relevant.
It all begins with Dinner…
Ian Dicker is a Parish councillor for Bramford, a Suffolk Tree Warden and accredited Master Composter. He has been composting plant waste for as long as he can remember and in the last few years has composted all his food waste with bokashi bran. Since Suffolk County Council announced the kerbside food waste collection, he expanded his system to recycle all the left-over food from his neighbours using a ridan compost turner and a supply of local woodchips.
Ian works with three kinds of volunteer, who are invested at different levels. At the base level, allotmenteers who don’t live in Duckamere drop their food surplus in a plastic bucket that is kept inside a galvanised bin on the allotment. They add the supplied bran and composters feed it into the Ridan when it is full and mature.
Approximately half the participants put their food into buckets and add the inoculated bran as they go. They then deliver their full buckets to the machine, alert Ian by text and he feeds it in. Four volunteers are more involved and feed their waste buckets in when ready. Ian manages the project data which the volunteers add to, this records how much food waste and wood chip goes in by weight and also keeps a record of the daily temperature inside the machine.
Jo Metcalfe is the founder and director of Greener Growth, she created Greener Growth following twenty five years of therapeutic practice. Recovering from serious ill-health during her late teens, she practiced a range of therapies which had a huge impact earlier in her life.
Greener Growth emerged as a result of these experiences and to find new methods of reaching more people in need. The concept was developed to incorporate fresh food-growing and environmental conservation as these areas seemed to her to offer a natural pathway to self-healing and growth.
Volunteering at Blundeston Prison and working with the inmates and psychotherapists at the Therapeutic Community (TC) for eighteen months gave her the ideal opportunity to trial some of the concepts she had in mind. Training with the late permaculture expert Patrick Whitefield and obtaining the certificate in Permaculture Design cemented these ideas.
Through the connections developed during this formative period she began to extend the range and scope of projects. As the Community Interest Company (CIC) was formed we were able to include prisons at different security levels; schools and rural and urban communities experiencing social isolation.
Workshop 3: Growing Communities Through Food
Panel Q & A
Krysia Woroniecka is a steering group member for the Suffolk Food Partnership, championing a re-localised food system by linking up producers with other organisations and markets. Krysia is a former food systems campaigner for campaign group, Foodrise, turned Market Gardener and is a member organiser for the Landworkers Alliance in East Anglia. Until recently she ran Suffolk Kids Kitchen- family cooking workshops making easy veg-rich seasonal meals using ingredients from local small scale producers, building health, community and resilience.
Susannah Robirosa - ActivGardens Fundraising & Development Manager - ActivLives
I have spent the past 18 years leading the development of two redundant urban green spaces in Ipswich into creative, innovative and diverse community gardens offering volunteering and learning opportunities in gardening and food-growing, nature conservation, beekeeping and woodworking. We distribute our harvest to 65+ families who use the local “Top Up” shop, encouraging them to cook with local produce and get involved in growing it too. Our third base is in Sudbury’s main park, where we work with volunteers of all ages and abilities and run a project for young people. Over the years we have worked with schools, residential care homes, and mental health units, and inspired and helped many groups develop community garden/ food-growing/ nature projects - activgardens.
The People’s Community Garden includes a community apiary, CRESS community hub and ActivSheds construction project, while Chantry Walled Garden, in Chantry Park, is a volunteer-run plant nursery growing plants for sale to the public, together with an accessible Garden for Older People.
My job with ActivLives represented quite a career jump – as an English graduate, I worked for many years as a journalist in London and Melbourne before settling on the Essex/ Suffolk border with my husband and three children in 1995. While working as a sub editor at the East Anglian Daily Times, I decided to study for an RHS Diploma in Horticulture at Writtle College. I briefly ran a gardening business with a colleague, before landing a job with the Town & Bridge Project, now ActivLives, in 2008.
Theo A. Michaels is a professional chef, presenter, award winning author and previous Masterchef contestant.
A regular on BBC Morning Live as guest chef and off-site presenter, Theo previously spent two years as resident chef on Channel 4’s Steph’s Packed Lunch (finishing the last show of the series) and has been causing havoc and cooking delicious food on our TV screens for over a decade. Theo is a weekly columnist for Best Magazine, a Kenwood and CannedFoodUK Ambassador and frequently in the press, on TV, radio and cooking and hosting at food festivals.
Ten published cookbooks, two winning the Gourmand World Cookbook awards. His titles include Orexi (translated into 3 languages) Rustica, SHARE, CANNED, Grazing and Feasting Boards, Theo’s Family Kitchen, Cypriana and the Kitchen Cupboard Chef to name a few.. All are published and distributed in the UK, USA and internationally.
Theo still gets’ his hands dirty as Executive Chef for an international events company, Elsewhere Events, and also owns a cool little coffee and waffle house in Hertfordshire.
Theo has three children and during lockdown Theo was named internationally as the ‘UK’s home economist’ after hosting 36 live kids cookalongs for 3 months.
Theo is also co-founder of FiveDinners.com an online curated meal planning service with over 30,000 members.
Theo was born in London and comes from a large Greek Cypriot family. Theo lived in America for five years, has eaten his way around the world with a backpack and his thirst for adventure not yet sated. He swam with piranhas in the Amazon, participated in an impromptu Ayahuasca ceremony in Bolivia, trekked mount Fuji and Macchu Pichhu, and eaten everything along the way (don’t mention Fugu fish in Japan, rat stir fry, guinea pigs, tarantulas or some others he’s trying to forget…) Theo now lives in Hertfordshire with his wife, three children and annoying dog.
Theo started his food career running a sell-out pop up restaurant for two years cooking 8-course taster menus championing Greek cuisine, became an established private chef receiving recognition by The Financial Times and Telegraph.
Theo was guest chef at the Sheraton Grande Hotel in Bangkok and the exclusive Paresa resort in Kamala Hills, Thailand.
He is known for cooking ‘elegant village food’ inspired by the flavours of Greece and Cyprus while also down-to-earth family staples keeping food unpretentious and accessible.
Gaina Dunsire is a Director of Barleybird, a Community Interest Company which was founded in 2023 with a mission to build understanding of agroecology and create capacity to empower, engage and change food systems.
Gaina worked as Secondary Teacher in the UK and overseas for 12 years, before going on to complete a Permaculture Design Certificate in 2011 and an MSc in Sustainable Horticulture and Food Production at Schumacher College in 2014.
Gaina has over 10 years experience designing and facilitating projects around food and farming for children and young people, as well as training teachers and farmers whilst working as a Regional Education Consultant for LEAF Education.
Through Barleybird, she hopes to use her skills and experience to enable more people to engage with agroecological food systems.
John Pawsey is the owner of Shimpling Park Farms Limited, a farm that grows a range of crops and a breeding flock of sheep. He converted the farm to organic production in 1999 and since then has improved the soil and increased biodiversity while maintaining profitable food production. He is a Fellow of the Royal Agricultural Society and writes for various publications including the Farmers Weekly
John Sanderson owns South Elmham Hall and Farm in ‘The Saints’ between Bungay, Harleston and Halesworth. John describes himself as a recovering arable farmer. He took over his farm at aged 18 years old. Having farmed for over 50 years in January 2022, John gave up arable farming, and the entire farm was entered into a Natural England Higher Level Stewardship Scheme, the majority in wood pasture creation.
The farm is steeped in history, and John has a deep fascination with both the historic and natural world. The current stewardship agreement allows the farm to be reset to the context of its medieval past while addressing the current biodiversity crisis. The farm is grazed by a herd of Sussex cattle producing organic beef. For 25 years John and his wife Nicole hosted weddings on the farm and ran a restaurant and conference venue.
Heidi is the founder of Helping Hands Breckland CIO, which she established at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to support people facing hardship within the local community.
Since then, the charity has grown to operate two food hubs and a community café, providing vital support, tackling food insecurity and bringing people together. We also provide wraparound support, cookery classes, helping individuals and families access additional advice, guidance and practical assistance to address the wider challenges they face.
Heidi is also a member of the Board of Operations for Nourishing Norfolk, where she contributes to the wider mission of improving access to affordable food and supporting communities across Norfolk.
Heidi is passionate about making a positive difference, reducing food poverty, building stronger, more connected communities and ensuring people have the support and skills they need to thrive.
Jenny has been Museum Director for 10 years and led the transformation of the Museum of East Anglian Life to the Food Museum in 2022. Prior to coming to Suffolk, she led projects at English Heritage and Imperial War Museums. She chairs Stowmarket Culture Group and sits on the Suffolk Chamber of Commerce board.
Oliver Paul is the High Sheriff of Suffolk for 2026-27, he is also an entrepreneur and farmer based on the Shotley Peninsula. Oliver is one of the directors of the Suffolk Food Hall, an award winning business championing local producers, collaboration and independent enterprise.
He holds a Masters in environmental geochemistry which continues to inform his understanding of how to balance the pressures and pleasures of our natural environment with the needs of people. An early career as a business consultant with CapGemini working across Europe, provided a core understanding of achieving changes and challenging thought.
Oliver's love of Suffolk and his desire to make the county a better place for all is manifested in many activities particularly his involvement in promoting the visitor economy with a focus on Ipswich.
Sarah Langford is a former barrister, bestselling prize-nominated author, and freelance writer and speaker. Her books - In Your Defence: Stories of Life and Law (pub Penguin 2018) about her decade as a criminal and family barrister and Rooted: Stories of Life, Land and a Farming Revolution (pub Penguin 2022) about her experience of transforming a Suffolk farm - blend memoir with real life stories. Both have been optioned for television. Sarah now writes regularly on issues of sustainability for newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Times, The Spectator and Country Life Magazine. She is an experienced panel and roundtable moderator, speaker, radio and podcast guest.
Book your free place at the Suffolk Food Summit 2026 - celebrating local food, building resilience, and improving health.
Please note we will do our best to accommodate all requests, but we reserve the right to decline bookings if required.
Arrival is from 08:30, including workshop sign‑up. Lunch and refreshments will be provided. Please advise us of any access or dietary requirements when booking your place.
We look forward to welcoming you to the Suffolk Food Summit.
