The Impact Interviews

Ralph Pickles is a former executive at ICI (acquired by AkzoNobel), CEO of Quorn Foods, and President of Sensient Technologies Corporation who now sits on the boards of high-potential companies such as CellRev and Noctura.

His experience in bringing new foods to market, especially proteins, is unparalleled. Ralph brings to life the motivations behind the develoment of the Quorn product, some of its challenges and ultimately its success in being at the forefront of the meat-free protein revolution.

Alberto Martellini assists funders, large financial organisations, innovation ecosystems and non-for-profit firms in creating an impact.  He talks passionately about the contribution that volunteers and volunteering makes to our society and calls for us to say 'thank you' more often.

After nearly 9 years at American Express, he has (amongst many other things) deployed his expertise in his home county of Kent, England as a board member of Kent Savers Credit Union where he created and secured a Social Impact strategy to identify, measure and communicate the effect of basic financial products and services to members and communities across Kent.

He is also a board member at Kent Community Energy, a community-based network innovation project to achieve climate resilience for in Kent (England).

Marianne Siegfried-Brookes is the founder and Director of the German Academy, a UK-based non-profit organisation, whose goal is to give their students a German-speaking identity or to strengthen it, and to make German a natural part of their lives.

With over 1000 students across the length and breadth of the UK, Marianne's passion for a natural and immersive language learning shines through.

400 million people a year suffer from Urinary Tract Infections. These cases are estimated to result in over 230,000 deaths. We need new ways to test and treat sufferers.

Meet Emma Hayhurst, a microbiologist and winner of a Discovery Award from the Longitude Prize. Emma is known for her passion for addressing inequalities in both healthcare and the gender balance in STEM businesses. This conviction has seen her make regular appearances at speaking engagements, on podcasts and even national press, TV and radio, including Woman’s Hour on Radio 4.

In this episode, Emma speaks passionately about the importance of treating UTIs effectively, but also on how investors are now recognising the importance of creating impact through their investment in Llusern.

Ehsan Vaghefi is the founder and CEO of Toku Eyes. Now based in California, USA, Ehsan's career was inspired by his father, who's experience with preventable blindness has driven Ehsan's lifelong commitment to eliminating preventable disease.

You can meet Ehsan here and learn more about his work developing an AI engine that can assess the risk of Cardiovascular disease by imaging your eye during routine eye check appointments.

https://coolfarm.org/resources/measurements-that-count-impact-report-2023/

Richard Profit is CEO of the Cool Farm Alliance, a non-profit who's vision is to create a global food and agriculture system that builds soil carbon, mitigates climate change and allows for the restoration of ecological balance.

Their Impact Report is now available and charts the journey of the Cool Farm Tool since it began just over a decade ago.

• Take a look at how the Cool Farm Tool is being used around the world, by whom and the impact it's having.
• Collecting these impact stories has only just begun and the collection is already rich.
• You will find 14 impact stories that span the globe, with specific examples from 13 countries and six cases that span more than five countries.
• The crops represented include: cotton, coffee, dairy, sugar, wheat, tomatoes, potatoes, barley and more!

Sarah Headen is the Education Manager for Creation Theatre, Oxfordshire's largest producing theatre company. Home Delivery masters the art of producing online theatre for and by Children, combining zoom and theatre with children all over the world.

Specialising in classic texts in unusual locations for over 25 years, it brings the stories we know and love to life, performing in extraordinary spaces from the MINI car plant, The Bodleian Library, Oxford’s historic Covered Market to The London Library to online. 

In April 2020 the organisation moved swiftly to master the digital stage, pioneers in broadcasting live performances online. Creation Theatre inspire hundreds of children every year – not only through their productions but term time and holiday workshops both in Oxford and online. 

Karen Daly-Gherabi is an accomplished international business leader with an extensive background in diversity and inclusion, capability development, leadership and organisational change. Her deep understanding of cultural and sector norms across education, government, third and public sector organisations provide unique perspectives on recruitment and performance.

Her devotion to creating impact, particularly for women and girls, has been lifelong and complex, having worked in Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Egypt.

Pablo Munoz developed the Mind Your Business programme to help small business owners create mental wellbeing whilst running their business.

https://mindyourbusiness.uk/

A team of researchers from Durham University, led by Professor Pablo Munoz, engaged in a collaborative research journey with a group of business owners to study a complicated problem: the deterioration of self-worth amongst business owners.

After 18 months, they found mismatches between expectations and experiences at three levels - purpose, autonomy and achievement - which surface as business owners reflect on execution, performance and fulfilment experiences.

So, it is not the stressful experiences or heavy workload themselves that trigger negative emotions, rather it is the compounding of incongruences between expectations of ideal states and actual experiences at the level of purpose, autonomy, and achievement.

Tackling issues of self-worth in new business creation is extremely important, because its deterioration has implications not only for their psychological functioning, but for the performance of the business. New business owners with diminished self-worth engage in rumination, frequently criticizing themselves and their abilities. They rarely welcome compliments and tend to focus on mistakes, leading to negative judgments and overly critical evaluations of their performance, and their value as business owners and human beings.

Existing support programmes are ill-equipped to tackle these problems, as they tend to focus on self-confidence and self-esteem.

The MYB programmes help business owners navigate through these incongruences and their effects and equip them with tools to rethink their businesses. We help them form more positive and stable conceptualizations of themselves and rebuild their businesses around them. Mixing wellbeing and business performance is now possible.

Our research was funded by UKRI and received the 2023 Best paper award for Excellence in Research on the General Topic in Entrepreneurship, presented by the National Federation of Independent Business in the USA.

Leo Campbell is passionate about making food great again.

https://www.superloaf.co.uk/

His company, Modern Baker is an emerging 'food-as-medicine' research company, as well as the UK's first healthy baking brand. It is seen as a potential disruptor within the food industry and at the vanguard of solving the UPF problem.

Its mission is become an Impact Unicorn, 'to have a positive impact on 1B people by 2028', putting purpose before profit all the way.

The company's essential platform technology is targeted fermentation, a word synonymous in many languages with alchemy, for very good scientific reasons. Operating in one of the most progressive areas of biotechnological research, digestive health and the human microbiome (gut health), Modern Baker identifies, develops and validates science to turn high volume packaged staple foods from a net negative for humankind, to a net positive. Much of the research has been (and still is) funded by 6 successive funding awards from Innovate UK.

Diet related chronic ill-health is paralysing healthcare globally, already costing trillions of dollars plus the wider societal impacts, and getting worse. Modern Baker is developing a consumer brand that will have a valuable role in the prevention and management of chronic lifestyle diseases, including obesity and diabetes.

In 2023 Modern Baker launched Superloaf into M&S and Ocado, the company's first proof-of-concept, nutrient-dense product, based on 6 years' research and development. An excited media has vested on Modern Baker a slew of positive headlines including 'Is This The Healthiest Loaf Of Bread Ever Made?'.