About Sourcing Stewards
Changing the food system from inside the businesses that run it
Almost everything the UK eats is bought, made or served by a food business. What those businesses buy, where it comes from and the standards it's produced to are decided inside them, by people whose job titles often say nothing about an ethical and sustainable food system.
“Stewardship is the careful and responsible management, oversight, and protection of something or someone entrusted to one's care.”
Where the decisions get made
A supermarket's supplier standards decide how the food it sells is produced, and what suppliers have to prove about where it came from. A manufacturer's product specification decides what goes into a recipe and where it's sourced from. A caterer's menu strategy decides how much of what it serves is plant-based. A buyer's contract decides which suppliers stay in the supply chain and which get dropped.
Campaigners don't make any of those decisions. Category managers, sustainability managers, technical managers, responsible sourcing coordinators and product technologists do, and between them they shape more of the food system than most of us could from anywhere else.
Why it matters who's in the job
Someone is going to write those standards either way. If it's a person who only thinks about cost, the standards get set at the legal minimum, and nobody in the room pushes back, not through malice, but because no one was looking for the opportunity to improve the food system. If it's someone who understands what sourcing standards and protein choices mean for climate, nature, health, and animals, the same job can change what a whole business sells.
That's our theory of change in one sentence. Get people who want a better food system into the jobs where these decisions are made, and the decisions start to shift.
Not every job on the board is one of those jobs yet. Some are the step before, like a coordinator job where you build experience with supplier standards, or a technologist job where you learn how specifications are written. The people who'll decide what supermarkets sell in ten years' time are taking jobs like these now, so we list them too, and we're clear about which is which.
It helps the people pushing from outside too
Campaigners and policy people push food businesses from the outside, and that pressure works better when someone on the inside is ready to act on it. An insider knows who's on side, what's already being discussed, and what wording would let the business say yes.
Two routes, one goal
Better standards for what's already bought. Jobs close to supplier standards, certification and audits, where the rules suppliers have to meet are set and checked.
A better mix of what gets bought. Jobs with influence over menus, reformulation and category strategy, where a business can shift what it sells towards plant proteins.
Better standards improve the food that's already in the system. A shift in the product formulation changes what the system produces in the first place. Both matter, and the same people are often in a good position to work on either.
Why a job board?
Far more people want to work on fixing the food system than there are campaign and NGO jobs to go round. Meanwhile, food businesses advertise hundreds of jobs with real influence over what gets bought, and hardly anyone who cares about this applies. Those jobs are never described as a way to change things, and no one explains what you could do from inside one.
That's the gap we're trying to close. The jobs already exist. We point people to them and explain why they're worth doing.
How it works
We're a non-profit. We never charge candidates and we don't take fees from employers for listings. You don't need to sign up or give us anything to use the board: no account, no CV, no mailing list you didn't ask for. Every job links straight to the employer's own advert. If you join the coaching waitlist we ask for a bit more, and the privacy notice explains exactly what and why.
We're not recruiters. We find jobs, give an honest view of each one, and explain what you could change from it.
For now, we're a job board, and that's on purpose. It's the smallest useful thing we could build, and we'd rather do it well than promise more than we can deliver. But finding the job is only half of it. Getting hired takes preparation most people coming from charities and campaigns haven't had. And once you're in, it can be hard. You're often the only person in the building who thinks the way you do, with no obvious person to ask.
So, we're building two more things. The first is one-to-one coaching; helping people build the credibility these jobs need and get through interviews where the mission stays unspoken. It isn't running yet, but you can join the waitlist. The second is a peer network, so nobody does this alone. It'll bring together people in similar jobs, including some already working in food businesses, to share what's working, what to raise and when, and how to stay in the room.
Who's behind this
I'm Matt Unerman. I started Sourcing Stewards because I see an untapped opportunity to improve the food system.
I've spent my career working in sustainable and ethical food systems. Somewhere along the way, I kept running into the same gap.
Campaigners, policy people and alternative protein founders put a huge amount of effort into getting food businesses to commit to better sourcing. Sometimes it works, but then the commitment lands in a business with no one to carry it through. No one in procurement really wants to turn “we've pledged to do better” into what they actually buy. So, the pledge stalls, or it ends up as a PR line instead of a change in what gets bought.
That's the gap Sourcing Stewards is here to fill.
This isn't a new problem, and it isn't going away on its own. Food production and consumption has been becoming less sustainable, healthy, and ethical for decades, and it'll keep going that way until something inside the system changes who makes the buying decisions, and why.
A lot of money and talent already goes into campaigning for these changes and building better alternatives. Almost none goes into getting people who care about the food system into the procurement and sustainability jobs that decide what a business buys. That's not because it's a bad idea. It's just been overlooked while everyone's attention was elsewhere.
My vision for Sourcing Stewards is simple: A food system where sourcing decisions are ethical and sustainable. Our mission is to help people build careers in food-sourcing roles, where they can shape decisions that transform the food system.