Sustainability is on your board agenda. Upstream expertise isn’t in the room.
Retained counsel for FMCG boards and executives. The questions about scope 3, raw materials and supplier risk get answered by someone who has worked both ends of your chain.
You’re carrying the question. I’ve carried the answer.
You’re a CSO, CPO or CEO at a mid-to-large food, beverage or personal-care brand. New laws or investor scrutiny have put your supply chain on the board agenda. Your team can measure it and write the report, but nobody at your table has stood in the field where the crop is grown. The programme exists on paper. The board’s questions still land on you.
A standing seat for upstream judgement.
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Board attendance
Quarterly in your meeting, building a direct link between specific supply chain threats and the executive choices they impact.
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Monthly advisory calls
A regular call to talk through a supplier issue, a claim or a commitment before it goes public.
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Looking ahead
What's changing in the next twelve months in your raw materials, your regions and your regulations.
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Review and challenge
Your existing strategy and public commitments stress-tested for operational reality before you announce them.
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Board papers
The upstream picture written for the board, in board language. Not a sustainability report.
What changes when your adviser has actually farmed.
Most board advisers understand frameworks. I understand the gap between what a sustainability policy says and what happens in a field during the growing season, because I spent eight years growing food commercially before I ran supplier programmes for Tesco, built traceability at Unilever, and advised clients across food, technology, financial services and the public sector at Capgemini.
That means the advice is grounded in what suppliers will actually do, not what a framework assumes they will. It’s the difference between a commitment that holds and one you end up explaining.
Decisions made before the press release.
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Board decisions on sustainability risk made faster, with more confidence, before problems reach the press or the regulator.
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Public commitments stress-tested before they're announced, so the person who made the pledge isn't the one explaining why it slipped.
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The supply chain questions answered at your table, by someone who has seen where the data comes from.
No. I work with your internal team, not around it. Your Head of Sustainability gets a senior ally who has run the function, and the board gets an independent voice. Most internal teams are the ones who ask me to stay.
Advisory is judgement, not delivery: board attendance, standing calls, papers, challenge. If you need someone inside the programme running it day to day, that’s Programme Leadership. The discovery call will tell you which one you actually need.
From £1,500 a day, retained and shaped around your board calendar. It’s the only published number in this category, and that’s deliberate. If the budget conversation needs to happen, better it happens on page one.
