Future-Proofing Food Infrastructure
Climate Risk, Operational Resilience & Business Continuity Across Food & Beverage
In-person event
Date:
Tuesday 23rd June 2026,
5pm - 7pm
Venue location:
Mitie PLC, The Shard,
32 London Bridge Street,
London SE1 9SG
The food and beverage industry is entering a new era of climate exposure
The food and beverage industry is entering a new era of climate exposure where disruption is no longer confined to agricultural supply chains alone. Flooding, overheating, water stress, energy disruption and infrastructure vulnerability are increasingly becoming operational and commercial realities affecting manufacturing sites, logistics networks, depots, estates, workforce continuity and long-term business resilience.
Food businesses ultimately operate through physical environments and interconnected systems. Factories require stable energy and water supplies, distribution networks rely on resilient infrastructure, workplaces need to remain safe and operational, and retail environments depend on increasingly complex service and operational systems functioning under pressure. Yet many climate conversations across the sector still remain heavily focused upstream, without fully recognising the growing operational exposure sitting across estates, assets and infrastructure.
At the same time, investor scrutiny, disclosure expectations and regulatory pressure around physical climate risk are accelerating rapidly, creating increasing pressure for organisations to move beyond high-level sustainability ambition towards more credible resilience, adaptation and continuity planning. The question is no longer whether climate disruption will affect business operations, but how prepared organisations are for the scale and interconnected nature of the risks emerging across the environments they depend upon every day.
How prepared is the infrastructure underpinning the food system for a more volatile climate future?
As part of London Climate Action Week 2026, Future Food Movement, Mitie and Climate X are bringing together a curated group of senior leaders from across the food and beverage sector for an evening focused on one of the most commercially significant and operationally urgent challenges facing the industry. Set in London during one of the world’s leading convening moments for climate leadership and cross-sector collaboration, the session is designed to move beyond sector silos and create a more practical conversation around resilience, operational readiness and implementation in an increasingly volatile operating environment.
Curated by Future Food Movement
The evening will explore how organisations can better understand physical climate exposure across estates, assets and operations, how resilience risks are beginning to surface commercially across the sector, and what more practical adaptation planning and investment prioritisation could look like in reality. Combining strategic insight, expert perspectives and peer discussion, the session is designed to create space for more candid cross-sector conversation around the operational implications of climate disruption and the leadership challenges emerging underneath it.
Mitie x Climate X
The event will also spotlight the emerging partnership between Mitie and Climate X, combining climate risk analytics with operational delivery expertise to help organisations better identify vulnerabilities, prioritise resilience action and strengthen long-term business continuity planning.
Why this conversation matters now
Climate resilience is rapidly becoming a core business issue for the food industry.
Across manufacturing, logistics, retail and operational estates, organisations are increasingly being forced to confront critical questions:
Which sites and operations are most vulnerable to climate disruption?
Where does physical infrastructure risk create commercial exposure?
How should businesses prioritise resilience investment?
What does credible adaptation planning now look like?
How do organisations move beyond reporting and disclosure into practical action?
For many businesses, the challenge is no longer whether climate disruption will affect operations, but whether resilience planning is keeping pace with the scale and speed of emerging risk.
Places are limited. Register your interest to request a place on the guest list.
Meet the speakers
Helen Ireland
Strategy & Transformation Director,
Future Food Movement
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With a career spanning some of the UK’s best-known food and drink brands, Helen brings deep expertise in embedding sustainability into commercial strategy. She supports businesses at every stage of their journey - building cross-functional capability, unlocking organisational momentum and designing climate-positive roadmaps that stick. Before joining Future Food Movement, Helen led transformational sustainability work at Sainsbury’s, Costa Coffee and Cafédirect, integrating ESG into finance, strategy, product, brand and supply chains. She’s passionate about collaborative learning, systems thinking and empowering teams to move from intent to action - ensuring sustainability becomes everyone’s business, not just a function.
Heena Minocha
ESG Reporting Lead,
Mitie
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Heena leads ESG reporting and climate advisory, helping organisations navigate complex sustainability and compliance requirements. She partners with clients across sectors to strengthen their approach to climate reporting ensuring it is not only compliant, but meaningful for decision-making and long-term strategy.
Her work focuses on bridging the gap between regulatory expectations and practical implementation. She supports organisations in translating evolving frameworks into clear, structured reporting, while building confidence in their data, disclosures, and governance.
Working closely with senior stakeholders and delivery teams, Heena drives consistency, quality, and innovation across reporting cycles. She is passionate about making ESG reporting more actionable, helping organisations move beyond compliance towards insight-led sustainability strategies.
David Dowson
Net Zero Manager & Chartered Environmentalist, Mitie
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David is a Net Zero Manager with Mitie and a Chartered Environmentalist with more than 17 years’ experience across environmental management, corporate sustainability, ESG and net zero delivery. At Mitie he helps lead a team of consultants and analysts supporting public and private sector organisations to develop practical, compliant and commercially focused sustainability programmes.
David has extensive experience in ISO 14001 and ISO 50001 management systems, environmental auditing, climate change risk assessment, ESG reporting, carbon accounting, training and environmental compliance. He has delivered programmes for complex estates and major clients including central government, defence, financial services, healthcare, construction and facilities management.
In addition, he is a Fellow of ISEP, an ISEP registered tutor, an ISO 14001 Lead Auditor and is currently in his 5th year of study for a PhD in pollution classification with the University of Birmingham. David brings a strong blend of technical expertise, commercial leadership and education to help clients improve performance, strengthen resilience and embed long-term environmental governance.
Grace Thomson
Head of Strategic Alliances and Partnerships,
Climate X
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Grace leads partnerships at Climate X. Focused on the critical challenge of climate physical risk, she works with consultancies across sectors to help organisations understand their exposure to climate hazards and build robust resilience strategies.
Her work sits at the intersection of climate science and business strategy — translating complex risk data into frameworks that clients can act on with confidence. Whether engaging financial services firms assessing asset exposure or infrastructure teams stress-testing supply chains against future climate scenarios, she is focused on making climate risk tangible and the path to resilience clear. By partnering closely with consultancies, she extends that impact at scale — equipping advisors with the tools and insight they need to guide their clients through one of the defining challenges of our time
Will Clare
Decarbonisation Lead, Future Food Movement
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Will Clare advises on the net zero transition for the food industry, ranging from product impact assessments, to setting SBTs, producing training content for a better understanding of climate change to guidance for site teams on how to deliver reductions in energy use and the development of net zero pathways. He runs workshops and lectures for a variety of different industries and organisations on climate change.
What to expect:
5:00pm- Arrival
5:30pm — Welcome and industry context
5:40pm — Expert panel discussion
6:20pm — Facilitated peer discussion and networking
7:00pm — Close
Who should attend:
This event is designed for senior leaders across:
Food and beverage manufacturing
Retail and distribution
Supply chain and logistics
Property and estates
Operations and facilities
Sustainability and ESG
Risk and resilience
Infrastructure and capital planning
Investment and finance.
Attendance is limited to maintain a high-quality, senior peer environment.
Register Your Interest
Places are limited. Register your interest to be considered for the guest list.
About the Event Partners
Future Food Movement is a leadership platform and strategic partner helping organisations navigate the growing complexity shaping the future of the food system. Through senior convening, cross-sector insight and capability development, FFM supports leaders to turn volatility, risk and system change into more confident action and decision-making.
Mitie is a leading facilities transformation company supporting organisations to operate more resilient, efficient and future-ready estates and infrastructure. Through its climate risk and resilience capabilities, Mitie helps businesses translate climate exposure insight into practical operational planning and action.
Climate X provides advanced climate risk analytics and location intelligence, helping organisations understand and quantify physical climate exposure across assets, operations and infrastructure to support better resilience planning and investment decisions.
Do you want to turn this intent into practical action?
Introducing the Food Systems Essential Accelerator
Equipping leaders to act on the system shifts discussed across the week in health, decarbonisation and resilience.
Starts September, 4 weeks, 2 hours per week