MAGAZINE
As you may have picked up from this month’s cover, we recently hosted our annual Contract Catering Awards – and it was a case of 13th time ‘lucky’ for Compass, who came away with a total of seven awards. While all the wins were truly deserved, I just wanted to take a moment to reflect on the amazing work done by Gemma Evans-Hurley.
We are, of course, used to celebrating the creativity of the industry’s incredible chefs, through the dishes they create and the people they inspire along the way. However, the remarkable thing about the head of culinary’s win is that it came not in a cheffing category but the Innovation Award. You can read more about her achievement on page 37, but the reason for her infiltrating the Innovation category was that she led a project creating the industry’s first maternity/menopause chef’s jacket.
“We launched it a year ago, with the intention of driving forward our inclusivity journey and enabling pregnant and postpartum colleagues to bring their best selves to work every day,” she told me. “This recognition acknowledges what a difference this has made for those colleagues. I am so proud of this work and want to thank my Women in Food colleagues for all that they do to drive this agenda forward.”
We will talk to Gemma about this further in our next issue. In the meantime, turn to page 20 for more information and profiles of all of our inspirational winners.
