About Sourcing Stewards
Ending factory farming from inside the industry that runs it
Every year in the UK, over 1.2 billion land animals and nearly one billion farmed fish are slaughtered for food. The decisions that determine how they live — and how many of them there are at all — are made inside food companies, by people whose job titles say nothing about animals.
“Stewardship is the careful and responsible management, oversight, and protection of something or someone entrusted to one's care.”
Where the suffering is actually decided
A retailer's supplier standards decide whether the chickens in its supply chain are fast-growing breeds kept at high stocking density, or slower-growing birds with more space. They decide whether the mother pigs behind its pork spend most of their lives in crates barely larger than their own bodies, or are group-housed with room to turn around. A manufacturer's product specification decides whether eggs are cage-free. A food service company's menu strategy decides how many animals are farmed for its meals at all. A buyer's contract decides which farms stay in the supply chain and which are dropped.
None of those decisions are made by campaigners. They are made by category managers, technical managers, responsible sourcing coordinators and product technologists — and they affect animals at a scale that is difficult to reach any other way.
Why who holds the job matters
Someone will write those standards regardless. If it is a person who optimises only for cost, welfare requirements get set at the legal minimum and nobody in the room argues otherwise — not through malice, but because no one was looking for the opportunity. If it is someone who understands what stocking density, breed choice and protein volumes mean for animals, the same job becomes a lever that moves millions of lives.
That is our entire theory of change: get people who care about animals into the seats where these decisions are made, and the decisions start to move.
It makes the rest of the movement work better
Corporate campaigns are among the most effective tools animal advocacy has. But they are slow and expensive partly because they are fought blind: campaigners rarely know who inside a company is sympathetic, which commitments are already under internal discussion, what the real barriers are, or which form of words would let a business say yes without losing face.
When someone on the inside shares the goal, that changes. A campaign ask can be shaped to land with the people who will actually decide it. A commitment that would have taken two years of public pressure can sometimes be won because the person holding the pen was looking for a reason to move. And after a commitment is signed — the point at which public attention moves on — someone remains who cares whether it is genuinely implemented rather than quietly diluted.
We aren't an alternative to campaigning, lobbying or litigation. We're a way of making them cheaper and faster, by putting people who understand the goal on the other side of the table.
Two routes, one goal
Better lives for farmed animals — roles close to supplier standards, welfare requirements, certification and audits, where the conditions animals live in are specified and enforced.
Fewer animals farmed at all — roles with influence over menus, reformulation and category strategy, where the proportion of a business that depends on meat and dairy can shift toward plant proteins.
Welfare improvements reduce suffering for animals alive now. The protein transition reduces how many are bred into it. We think both are worth doing, and that the same people are often well placed to do either.
Why a job board, of all things
There are far more people who want to work on ending factory farming than there are advocacy jobs for them. Meanwhile the food industry advertises hundreds of roles with real influence over animals, and almost no one in the movement applies — because those roles are never framed as advocacy, and nobody explains what could be done from inside one.
That gap is what we exist to close. Not by creating new jobs, but by pointing at the ones already there and making the case for them.
How we operate
We are a non-profit. We never charge candidates, we take no fee from employers for listings, and we don't collect your details — no accounts, no CVs, no mailing list you didn't ask for. Roles link straight to the employer's own posting.
We are not a recruiter. We find roles, judge them honestly, and explain what each one could change.
For now, that is all we are — a job board. It is deliberately the smallest useful thing, and we'd rather do it well than promise more than we can deliver. But getting someone into a role is only half the problem. Landing these jobs takes preparation most animal advocates haven't had, and succeeding in them once you arrive is harder still: you are often the only person in the building who thinks this way, and there is no obvious person to ask.
So we intend to grow into two further things. Training, to help people build the specific credibility these roles ask for and to navigate interviews where the mission stays unspoken. And a peer network, so that nobody is doing this alone — a group of people in comparable seats who can compare notes on what works, what to raise and when, and how to stay in the room.
Who's behind this
I'm Matt Unerman. I started Sourcing Stewards, and it's what I intend to spend the next several years doing.
I've spent my career working in sustainable food systems, with the last four years in animal advocacy. Somewhere in those four years, I kept running into the same gap.
External advocates — campaigners, policy people, alternative-protein founders — pour enormous effort into getting food businesses to commit to higher-welfare sourcing. Sometimes it works. But then the commitment lands inside a business with no one to actually carry it through: no one in procurement genuinely motivated to turn “we've pledged to do better” into a real purchasing decision. So pledges stall, or quietly become a PR line rather than a real shift in what gets bought.
That gap is what Sourcing Stewards exists to close.
This isn't a new problem, and it isn't shrinking on its own. Factory farming has been expanding for decades, and it will keep expanding until something inside the system changes who makes purchasing decisions, and why.
A huge amount of money and talent already goes into campaigning for these changes and building better alternatives. Almost none of it goes into the quieter work of getting people who genuinely care about animal welfare into the procurement and sustainability roles that actually decide what a business buys. Not because it's a bad idea. It's simply been overlooked while everyone's attention went elsewhere.
My vision for Sourcing Stewards is simple: a food system that no longer depends on factory farming. Getting there means changing who sits at the table when purchasing decisions get made, and making sure the people who get there actually care about what happens on the other end of that decision.